Until We Are Free Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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