“Revolutions invariably don’t solve the issue of justice, and in its place, suppression and limiting freedom replaces that idea.”

Whatever Iranian people have bought, they have bought in the black market.

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.

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.

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 have quite a large area, and that makes it more fun for us – certainly more satisfying, because it doesn’t restrict us to one particular idea or one particular style.

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing.

My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.

The U.S. – the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that’s hardly even a joke.

You have to have obedience; otherwise, the idea can spread that you don’t have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.