Shirin Ebadi Quotes

When the gravity of death first touched me, I'd found preoccupation with the minutiae of daily life meaningless. If we ultimately die, and turn to dust in the ground, should it ever truly upset us if the floor hasn't been swept quite recently enough.

We adapted to being at war, just as we had adapted to the chaos and upheaval of revolution. How amazing and yet tragic it is, I thought, the human instinct for

was a female Palestinian suicide bomber clutching a rifle in one hand and her little son in the other. This, it seemed, was the state’s only vision of gender equality. Ahmadinejad instituted separate elevators for men and women in government buildings, and he fired swaths of municipal workers who were not religious or devoted enough to his ideology. Tehran

Shirin Ebadi, premio Nobel per la Pace, aderendo a Science for Peace, ha scritto: «Prima di tutto il sapere libera la gente dall’ignoranza e la rende cosciente dei propri diritti e dei propri doveri. Chi non sa, non sa scegliere e non sa autodeterminarsi e rimane in balia di chi sceglie per lei o per lui, in balia dei regimi: per questo la libertà di ricerca scientifica è sorella della libertà di pensiero».

It is not important whether what he is chanting is true or not, whether you believe in it or not. Your decision to chant along with him is no measure of your commitment to justice or freedom or whatever lofty principle is at hand. Sometimes, radical slogans are a trap. They are shouted by infiltrators so that a group of students protesting a press crackdown can be depicted as seeking to overthrow the regime. Sometimes they are not traps at all but the frustrated stand of a brave person. But how are you to know? Your objective is to avoid being a pawn, to avoid getting dragged into trouble because you are curious, or believe you are seeing history being made." They

This was always the most painful part of my work: the searching eyes of the mothers and fathers whose children had been killed or were imprisoned, seeing in me some potential help. But the reality is that the fate of their sons and daughters rests largely on the political conditions of Iran, not on my abilities as a lawyer.

Under the Iranian code, the worth of a woman’s life equals half of a man’s, a point that often leads to grotesque legal judgments that effectively punish the victims. In this instance, the judge ruled that the ‘blood money’ for the two men was worth more than the life of the murdered nine-year-old girl, and he demanded that her family come up with thousands of dollars to finance their executions.

The ruling regime in Iran has many faults, but it is more representative than most in the Middle East outside Israel (though the trend is not encouraging—the Majles elections of 2004 and the presidential elections of 2005 were more interfered with and less free than previous elections). Despite repressive measures by the state, Iran is not a totalitarian country like the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It is a complex polity, with different power centers and shades of opinion among those in power. There is space for dissent—within certain boundaries. Iran still has the potential for self-generated change, as has been recognized by observers from Paul Wolfowitz to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah. Important independent Iranian figures like Shirin Ebadi and dissidents like Akbar Ganji have urged that Iran be left alone to develop its own political solutions. One theory of Iranian history, advanced by Homa Katouzian and others,5 is that Iran lurches from chaos to arbitrary autocracy and back again. There is certainly some evidence of that in the record. Perhaps increased political freedom would merely unleash chaos, and no doubt there are pragmatists within the current Iranian regime who make just that argument for keeping things as they are. One could interpret the crisis of the reform movement in 2000, followed by the press crackdown, as another episode in the Katouzian cycle. There are signs of disillusionment and nihilism among many young Iranians after the failure of the Khatami experiment.6 But I don’t believe in that kind of determinism. There is real social and political change afoot in Iran, in which the natural dynamic toward greater awareness, greater education, and greater freedom is prominent. Other Europeans in the seventeenth century used to say that England was a hopelessly chaotic place, full of incorrigibly violent and fanatical people who clamored to cut off their king’s head. A century later England was the model to others for freedom under the law and constitutional government.

I was a human rights defender, and I based my criticisms of the state on legal grounds. But authoritarian governments are not fond of shades of gray; they cannot tolerate any criticism at all,

If we all packed our suitcases and boarded planes, what would be left of our country? If we bowed our heads and stayed quietly at home, permitting them to say that Islam allowed the assassination of writers and the execution of teenagers, what would be left of our faith?

I thought of the courage it had taken for those young people in Tehran to go out into the streets holding those simple placards—“Where is my vote?”—with the openness and simplicity of a child, only to be razed down by bullets.

لقد شاركت بملء إرادتي و بحماسة في زوالي، كنت امرأة و قد طالب انتصار الثورة هذا بهزيمتي

We adapted to being at war, just as we had adapted to the chaos and upheaval of revolution".