“When I’m speaking, I’m speaking only for myself. At the same time, I know that these ideas have wide support among the Iranian population.”

Today, as a result of a miraculous set of circumstances,

Would Americans accept if we decided to come here and decide who your rulers should be? So why do you expect us Iranians to accept the idea that the United States shall come in there and decide who shall govern us?

When I talk about secularism, I’m talking about theories today. To give you for example, one example: Those who consider themselves followers of Mosaddeq today are adamantly against federalism.

Of course, everyone knows that I’m also opposed to the Iranian regime and I have said that we must change the regime. But it is us, the Iranians, that must change the regime.

And amongst the lower strata in Iranian society, we are witnessing an increasing rise of the expectation and it’s clear that the regime is incapable of satisfying these demands.

I am against revolution and am proud of it. Democracy cannot be created through revolutions.

It is like living with your wife, with whom you are in love and you are intensely involved in, but you also have tensions. And their position is that they want to deny that these tensions exist.

There is more disgruntlement, but because there is no media, the voice of this opposition is not heard outside Iran.

We believe in equal rights for all people in all nations. If Israel, the United States, Russia, Pakistan, other countries, China, have the right to have a nuclear program and nuclear bomb, Iran, too, must have that same right.

The issue has two dimensions. One is the legal dimension and the other one is the issue at the realpolitik. [In the] legal realm.

When women push their headscarf back an inch or two, this is interpreted to be a political act.

Let me begin by saying not only you can’t have democracy with $75 million. You can’t even have it with $750 billion.

But I know one thing for sure: That we, the Iranian people, are much more in line of danger than the West.

Religion is separate from the institution of the state.

We’ve had 60 years of intellectual development in Iran. How can we have the same system?

They lie on railroads, they tie themselves to the gates.

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.

With Urban Secrets, I just really liked the idea of wandering around chatting to people.

And evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously.

The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.

Unfortunately, Senator, nobody knows where the next innovative idea is coming from.

It’s about how you exist as a person in the world, and the idea that your work is more important than you as a person is a horrible, horrible message.

They looked at me and said, “We have no idea.” That’s why you have to make your own backstory.

I liked the idea of all of humanity fitting inside a sugar cube because more than 99.9% of matter is space.