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.”
― Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope

“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”
― Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening: A memoir of revolution and hope

“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, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran

“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”
― Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening

“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.”
― Shirin Ebadi, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran

“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.”
― Shirin Ebadi, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran

“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.”
― Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope

“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,”
― Shirin Ebadi, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran

“لقد شاركت بملء إرادتي و بحماسة في زوالي، كنت امرأة و قد طالب انتصار الثورة هذا بهزيمتي”
― Shirin Ebadi

“We adapted to being at war, just as we had adapted to the chaos and upheaval of revolution".”
― Shirin Ebadi

“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?”
― Shirin Ebadi, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran