Quotes About Iran

If Iran has a policy of detaining dual nationals as a tool of diplomatic leverage, then there will be consequences for Iran. We will not let them get away with it scot-free. They have to understand this is not a sustainable situation.

Whether you're dealing with your allies in Europe or you're dealing with a resurgent Russia, whether you're dealing with Iran or North Korea, you have to use the whole panoply of national tools of power to deal with the challenges the world faces.

The Arab conquest was not only a matter of military domination. It was not like the Mongol invasion. The Mongols invaded Iran, but Iran did not become Shamanist or Buddhist. Some people say that the Arab invasion was just a military conquest, but this is not so. Rather, it was accompanied by a profound spiritual transformation that took place wherever Muslims went and settled down.

There should be little doubt that Pakistan would deploy means to disrupt a Chabahar-pivoting India-Iran-Afghanistan alliance

Iran is five to 10 years away from having a nuclear weapon. We have time to try diplomacy.

Iran stands behind a substantial number of terrorist actions against us, together with Hizballah and the Islamic Jihad. It pretends to care for the Palestinians.

Iran, the Syrian regime's only regional ally, began dispatching military advisers to bolster Assad. (Syria had been the only country to support Iran during its eight-year-long war with Iraq, a conflict that ended in 1988, in which Saddam Hussein liberally used chemical weapons and Iran lost a million young men.) These intrusions transformed the Syrian revolution into a proxy war, where regional powers fought for influence.

Did you ever dream this could happen to us? He said, No I didn't, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic. And in a sense, he was right.

Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine will suddenly give way to showers and storms.

Switzerland had somehow become a bywordfor Western laxity: any program or action that was deemed un- Islamic was reproached with a mocking reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland.

Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is called slim-waisted: round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are an indication of the brewer's skill.

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby

Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is call slim-wasted:round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are and indication of the brewer's skill.

Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms. It was unpredictable: the regime would go through cycles of some tolerance, followed by a crackdown. Now, after a period of relative calm and so-called liberalization, we had again entered a time of hardships.

At some point, the truth of Iran's past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it as the truth of Lolita's is to Humbert. It became immaterial in the same way that Lolita's truth, her desires and life, must lose color before Humbert's one obsession, his desire to turn a twelve-year-old unruly child into his mistress.

That was when the myth of America started to take hold of Iran. Even those who wished its death were obsessed by it. America had become both the land of Satan and Paradise Lost.

We are not against cinema," Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, "we are against prostitution!")

His obtuseness reminded me that BP—previously known as British Petroleum—had started off as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company: the same company whose unwillingness to split royalties with Iran's government in the 1950s had led to the coup that ultimately resulted in that country's Islamic Revolution.)

The United States, under Reagan, cynically tried to have it both ways, publicly backing Iraq while secretly selling arms to Iran.)

Human beings are members of a whole In creation of one essence and soul. Ben informed me that those lines were written by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa'adi, one of the most beloved figures in Iranian culture. We found this ironic, given how much of my time at UNGA was devoted to trying to curb Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Apparently, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad didn't share the poet's gentle sensibilities.

a report would surface from the Pentagon or Langley, recommending that U.S. policy pay more attention to human rights and governance issues when dealing with our Middle East partners. But then the Saudis would deliver a vital tip that kept an explosive device from being loaded onto U.S.-bound cargo planes or our naval base in Bahrain would prove critical in managing a flare-up with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, and those reports would be relegated to the bottom of a drawer.

manifest in the IRGC's support for armed proxies like the Lebanon-based Shiite militia Hezbollah and the military wing of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas—made the Iranian regime Israel's single greatest security threat and contributed to the general hardening of Israeli attitudes toward possible peace with its neighbors.

the White House's interest in maintaining a sizable troop presence in Iraq was about more than a simple desire to ensure stability and reduce violence. It was also about preventing Iran from taking further advantage of the mess we'd made.

Acheson immediately understood the urgency of this message. He summoned Ambassador Franks and told him that the United States resolutely opposed "the use of force or the threat of the use of force" against Iran, and that Truman himself had "stressed most strongly that no situation should be allowed to develop into an armed conflict between a body of British troops and the Persian forces.