Let me begin by saying not only you can’t have democracy with $75 million. You can’t even have it with $750 billion.
AKBAR GANJIThe entirety of this discourse was such that it encouraged the kind of ascendancy for a man like Ayatollah Khomeini.
More Akbar Ganji Quotes
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I, too, am against the dismantlement of Iran.
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The most important dichotomy that I make for a society is between those who support democracy and human rights, and those who oppose it.
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We should put away the militaristic outlook.
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They lie on railroads, they tie themselves to the gates.
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He never made economic promises to people and as a result, he never led to dissatisfaction in this perspective. Because they need to get votes, they use misleading slogans. And this leads to rising expectations. I had a personal experience.
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The U.S. should start talking about disarmament, nuclear disarmament, of the region.
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We have two kinds of oppression. Oppression that is universal – everyone in Iran is subject to it. But everyone has also their own, unique way of experiencing this oppression.
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[In] every revolution, there is a great divergence between what the revolutionaries expect and what the revolution actually accomplishes.
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We’ve had 60 years of intellectual development in Iran. How can we have the same system?
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There are varieties of theories of revolution. According to one of these theories, only one of these theories, revolutions occur when there is an explosion of rising expectation.
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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.
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Khomeini obviously had many problems, but he had one clever side to him.
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The lower strata are suffering all kinds of oppression and the injustice that is inflicted upon them has many faces and many facets.
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What I’m worried about is that, in case that happens [nuclear explosion], then the Iranian people are the ones who are going to pay the heaviest price. But none of the Western countries have seriously talked about this.
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The difference between us and the other side is that they use populist and…kind of slogans that are…they fool the people.
AKBAR GANJI






