Hooman Majd · 272 pages
Rating: (1.9K votes)
“It is perhaps because of the Iranian concept of the home and garden (and not the city or town it is in) as the defining center of life that Iranians find living in a society with such stringent rules of public behavior somewhat tolerable. Iranian society by and large cares very little about what goes on in the homes and gardens of private citizens, but the Islamic government cares very much how its citizens behave once they venture outside their walls.”
― Hooman Majd, quote from The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
“All business in Iran is like first time sex: first there are the promises, then a little foreplay, followed by more promises and perhaps a little petting...at that stage things get complicated - you're not sure who's the boy and who's the girl, but what you do know is that if you continue, you might get fucked...so you decide to proceed cautiously, touching here and touching there, showering the other party with compliments, and whispering an undying commitment, and then maybe, just maybe, it will all end in coitus, but it is rarely as satisfying for one party as it is for the other.”
― Hooman Majd, quote from The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
“If we cannot understand the depth of feeling in the Muslim world toward Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islam as a political force, then we will be doomed to failure in every encounter we have with the world.”
― Hooman Majd, quote from The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
“The last Shah's father, Reza Shah, made the chador for women and the turban for men illegal in the mid 1930's...In the 1930's women had their chadors forcibly removed from their heads if they dared wear them and were sometimes beaten as well if they resisted.”
― Hooman Majd, quote from The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
“He had undoubtedly not availed himself of the ministry archives, archives that might have revealed to him that Iranian diplomats in Paris, from this, his own Foreign Ministry, had taken it upon themselves to issue Iranian passports to Jews escaping the very Holocaust they were aware of, but that he now denied.”
― Hooman Majd, quote from The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
“Some people he said, think that freedom means men being able to wear shorts or women to go about without the hijab. Others think that freedom means having a full belly.”
― Hooman Majd, quote from The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
Hooman Majd
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“I grunted. It's something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words—and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I'd been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant "I acknowledge that I've heard what you said; please continue.”
― Jim Butcher, quote from Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files
“الحرية الإنسانية لا تقاس تبعاً للإختيار المتاح للفرد، وإنما العامل الحاسم والوحيد في تحديدها هو ما يستطيع الفرد اختياره وما يختاره”
― Herbert Marcuse, quote from One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
“Do not labor uselessly at what helps not at all.”
― Aeschylus, quote from Prometheus Bound
“Johnson devoted an entire section to racial etiquette on the highway. “When driving their own cars,” he wrote, “they were expected to maintain their role as Negros and in all cases to give whites the right-of-way.” He later added, “If there is any doubt about whose turn it is to make a move in traffic, the turn is assumed to be the white person’s.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, quote from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“Candle is an X-ray, it's a matter of wavelength.”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from Dermaphoria
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