Soroosh Akef’s Reviews > King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran > Status Update

"the nine months between the revolution and the embassy seizure, Khomeini had taken Carter’s measure as a compromiser, as a man who would back down in the face of threats, and he made the bet his American nemesis would do the same again. On that bet, as on so many others, Khomeini won."

'The shah’s constant instructions on how martial law was to be implemented—the soldiers were “only to fire in the air, no matter how badly they were abused”—had led to a complete demoralization within the military.'

'Khomeini had urged his followers to “stage direct violent confrontation” with security forces and issued a call for martyrs, while Shariatmadari beseeched his followers to march peacefully and avoid marring the religious occasion with politics. To a remarkable degree, and to the astonishment of almost all observers, including those at the American embassy, the voice that won out was Shariatmadari’s.'

"Like economics, revolution is often a matter of faith, a test of the human capacity to believe. Convince enough people that an American dollar or Indian rupee has value, and it does. Convince enough people that a seemingly omnipotent dictator can fall, and he just might."

"In an ironic twist, a few years earlier the shah had insisted France end its visa requirement for Iranian citizens, and his enemies were now taking advantage of this change to fly to Paris unhindered."

"Yazdi served as a kind of prototype of the successive waves of Iranian students soon to follow: the politically awakened émigré who admired the American democratic system even as he seethed at that nation’s role in subverting it in his homeland."

"One reason diplomatic overtures between nations normally advance in small steps is that a concession, once granted, is almost impossible to withdraw or scale back without giving offense."

"In search of a literary reference that might parallel the rise and fall of the shah, biographers inevitably turn to one Greek myth in particular. It is the story of Icarus, of course, the fable of the brash young man who, given waxen wings, flies too close to the sun and is destroyed."

"[The British and the Soviets] also looked for a suitably pliant figurehead to take the deposed shah’s place. Their first choice was a pampered Qajar princeling living in London, but a complication there was that the man didn’t actually speak the native language."

Imagine that! The course of history would have gone a different direction if one man had bothered to learn his heritage language!