Quotes About Resistance

The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I think, he will.

El adversario al que se veía obligada a combatir no le parecía ya digno de la lucha ni de la victoria; no era una superior inteligencia la que desafiaba, sino la ineptitud; una gris extensión algodonosa, blanda y sin forma, que no ofrecía resistencia a nada ni a nadie...

The theoretical purpose of that grotesque absurdity is to establish a moral inversion: to make the initiation of force moral, and resistance to force immoral—and thus to obliterate the right of self-defense. The immediate practical purpose is to foster the activities of the lowest political breed: the provocateurs, who commit acts of force and place the blame on their victims.

los brutos, particulares o públicos, convencidos de que pueden gobernar a sus mejores por la fuerza, aprenderán la lección de lo que ocurre cuando la fuerza bruta tropieza con la inteligencia y con la fuerza aliadas.

The argument in response often went like this: Such brutality was certainly not desirable, but the West had left the militants no choice, there was no other way left to resist; nonviolent protest would not sway the dictator Assad, whose military was torturing and killing scores in detention centers, nor would it sway the United States, which had invaded and occupied Iraq, killed countless civilians, and sustained and protected Arab tyrants.

Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.

Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe.

I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you did---but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.

T]he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.

La curiosité, disait-elle, est la forme la plus pure de l'insoumission.

When two of my cousins were killed by the Islamic regime, some of my relatives who were now on the side of the government called my uncle to congratulate him on the death of his son and daughter-in-law.

the hostility of tyrants to imagination and ideas—is as relevant as ever.

And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran.

The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you anyway.

It should be clear by now that when I talk about books, I'm not talking about literature of resistance but literature as resistance.

Remember all that talk of yours about how the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience?

demonstrators were attacked by the government-backed vigilantes.

This nation is very strange. It watches tyranny in silence and in time it proves its own will—the fact of its existence—through passive resistance

If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.

Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.

we'll shove it up their ass.

I began to understand the true nature of my adversary. I wasn't running against Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or even the Republicans. I was running against the implacable weight of the past; the inertia, fatalism, and fear it produced.

They were actors in a rigged game, I decided, and I wanted no part of it.

Nous savons que la bataille qui nous attend sera longue [...] mais souvenez-vous toujours que, quels que soient les obstacles auxquels vous vous heurtez, rien ne peut résister à la puissance d'un million de voix qui réclament le changement.