Shirin Ebadi Quotes

The fundamentalists are increasing. People, afraid to oppose those fundamentalists, shut their mouths. It is really very difficult to make people move against a sensitive issue like religion, which is the source of fundamentalism.

First of all, the world criticizes American foreign policy because Americans criticize American foreign policy. We shouldn't be surprised about that. Criticizing government is a God-given right - at least in democracies.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

While we use American power to fight hard for democracy against extremism on both left and right, our critics seem suspicious of any assertion of United States power or influence against any government or group that claims to be on the left.

It's no surprise that the Bush administration's bullying swagger and blithe ignorance have caused much of the Muslim world to hold the U.S. in rock-bottom regard.

During most of the Bush administration, human rights and democracy in Egypt were on the front burner.

Few governments in the world, for example, praise human rights more ardently than does the government of France, and few have a worse record of supporting tyrants and killers.

In Iran, people are free to express their views. Every day, some people criticize the policies of the government.

Virtually all modern forms of extremism accuse liberal Western democratic systems of being hypocritical and, ultimately, weak.

Since the election, since the formation of a government, the death in Iraq has increased. The United States stands by, helpless to do anything about it. That's the reality, not George Bush's revisionist history!

So many people of my generation who served in the government were prisoners of the Cold War culture, still are.

After 9/11, most Americans were in no mood to talk with our enemies in the Middle East, whatever those enemies' ideology, and the Bush administration's policies of invasion and pre-emption reflected that sentiment.

We have an extreme rightwing government in this country, although it's called the Labour government.

A quarter-century after the end of the Vietnam War, and eleven years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, it has become commonplace to say that we Americans have no consensus on foreign policy. Across the political spectrum, left or right, most Americans still cling to whatever assumptions they held during our long journey through the Cold War.

Congress, it turns out, is filled with Republicans and Democrats eager to act as enablers for the most repressive forces in Iran.

As a senator from the only true swing district in the Texas Senate, I've been targeted by the GOP for my outspoken criticism of their extremist attacks on public education and voting rights, to name just two examples.

Every Arab nation votes against us at least two thirds of the time.

A Whig [Liberal] may be a fool, a Tory [Conservative] must be so.

A government that is brutal to its own people will be brutal to its neighbors and its enemies.

European intellectuals and Islamic radicals are in a kind of dark alliance to portray the United States as negatively as possible.

The U. S. put the Japanese in camps during World War II; it had McCarthyism and now they have [George W.] Bush. But it will all pass. Democracy corrects itself.

Common sense is not all that common in Washington DC.

Maintaining a continuity of foreign policy in the United States is not easy because it means that liberals and conservatives both shoot at you.

My Reichstag behaves as badly as it can, swinging backwards and forwards between the socialists egged on by the Jews, and the ultramontane Catholics; both parties being soon fit to be hung all of them, as far as I can see.

It’s not anti-Americanism that you see around the world. It is anti-Bushism