Ayman Odeh Quotes

I wanted to choose somewhere public, because I was scared of the KGB.

May 20, 2017, was one of the scariest days of my life. It was the day I realized I was being hunted by Erdogan.

The FSB's invisible presence continued; the agency became an intangible part of my Moscow life - sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, with someone in a back room clearly turning the volume of minor persecution up and down.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.

There are many people who live with terrorism every day.

My paranoia never ends, but I haven't been paranoid about being spied on my shadowy forces for some time now.

I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.

I think political people are afraid of me.

I felt like a hunted animal, followed constantly, waiting to be killed.

I love driving, but sometimes, I'm not too good at it because I spend too much time looking in the rearview mirror if I know I'm being followed. You don't respond like, 'Oh, there's paparazzi.' It's more like, 'There's a man, and he's going to attack me.' That's how your body responds.

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.

He killed his enemies because he was afraid they would kill him. Amin ordered entire tribes to be put to death, because he feared they would rebel.

Fear works. It is more effective than any drug, tactic, or torture device.

Terror is the order of the day.

One of the problems is that there are people in the shadows. There are people afraid of their own government

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

For a long time, I had this constant feeling that I just wanted to look behind me. The hairs on my neck were standing up all the time, I didn't know where was safe.

My mom told me many times how I need to be careful living inside the regime. We didn't say 'the regime.' We didn't even say 'North Korea.'

People were following me home in cars, singing outside my window at my flat. I couldn't go to pubs or supermarkets or walk down the street. It was bizarre, but that was my life.

I think someone follows me. They do the most random stuff. I get a photo taken through a burger drive-through window and it's like, 'What?'. They always seem like they're six feet away. I don't understand. I'm walking around and I don't see anybody.

Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear.