Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
Azar NafisiRead
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the bravery required not just for martyrdom but for sustaining one's beliefs in everyday life.
Azar Nafisi's quote reflects on the duality of courage, suggesting that while the ultimate sacrifice of dying for a cause is a profound act of bravery, the everyday struggle to live authentically for one's beliefs and values is equally daunting. It highlights the importance of steadfastness and resilience in the pursuit of a principled life, showcasing that living for a cause demands continuous strength and commitment.
In practice
During a motivational speech on activism.
Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effective tool used by the West, especially America, to corrupt and incite Iranian youth, and finally closed down all the Humanities departments in Iran's universities.
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?
I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
Even in my really bad, drugged-out days, I didn't go away. I still toured, still did interviews. I never gave up the fight. That's why I'm who I am today, because I didn't leave. And I think I made the right choice.
For every Harvey Weinstein, there's three or four thousand other pastors, coaches, teachers, uncles, cousins, and stepfathers who are committing the same crimes. We have to keep that in focus and we have to keep talking about it.
I wanted my faith to look the same to everyone else and to be the same for me regardless of what was going on - whether I was on the Super Bowl podium holding the trophy or when I was being benched two years later and people saying that I would never play again.
One tiny Hobbit against all the evil the world could muster. A sane being would have given up, but Samwise burned with a magnificent madness, a glowing obsession to surmount every obstacle, to find Frodo, destroy the Ring, and cleanse Middle Earth of its festering malignancy. He knew he would try again. Fail, perhaps. And try once more. A thousand, thousand times if need be, but he would not give up the quest.
If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.
The fight against evil is long and difficult. It is essential to pray constantly and to be patient.
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