Andrew Scott Cooper

“He (the Shah) liked to cite one of his favorite quotes, ‘Ingratitude is the prerogative of the people,’ and on another occasion said, ‘If the Iranian people were fair and compared their situation with other countries and how Iran was fifty years ago, they would see that they were living in peace. They had it so easy that they decided to have a revolution to supposedly further improve their lives. But this was not a revolution of the Iranian people. In fact it was collective suicide on a national scale that took place at the height of prosperity.”
― Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran

“The 52,000 Americans living in Iran in 1977 made up the largest concentration of U.S. nationals living abroad. Other expatriate communities in Iran included 8,000 Britons, 8,000 French, 16,000 West Germans, 20,000 Italians, and tens of thousands more Filipinos and Koreans employed as guest workers. ‘Look at them, crowed an Iranian businessman. ‘The flies have come to gather at the honeypot.”
― Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran