Azar Nafisi Quotes

74 quotes in 1230 categories

• Only curiosity about the fate of others, the ability to put ourselves in their shoes, and the will to enter their world through the magic…
• Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not…
• I believe in empathy. I believe in the kind of empathy that is created through imagination and through intimate, personal relationships. I am a writer…
• I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an…
• You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.
• Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.
• A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
• America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
• Every culture has something to be ashamed of, but every culture also has the right to change, to challenge negative traditions, and create to new…
• For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.
• I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic…
• I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism…
• I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.
• I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture - as if women…
• In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and…
• After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effective tool used…
• That, of course, is what great works of imagination do for us: They make us a little restless, destabilize us, question our preconceived notions and…
• Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes…
• My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.
• I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination.

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