All the Shah's Men Quotes

“the thirteenth-century mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, reject orthodoxy of any kind: I hold to no religion or creed, am neither Eastern nor Western, Muslim or infidel, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew or Gentile. I come from neither land nor sea, am not related to those above or below, was not born nearby or far away, do not live either in Paradise or on this Earth, claim descent not from Adam and Eve or the Angels above. I transcend body and soul. My home is beyond place and name. It is with the beloved, in a space beyond space.”
― Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

“The riots that shook Abadan led many Iranians to rally to the workers' cause, partly out of instinctive sympathy but also because of the grossly unequal terms under which the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company operated. In 1947, for example, the company reported an after-tax profit of £40 million-the equivalent of $112 million dollars-and gave Iran just £7 million. To make matters worse, it never complied with its commitment under the 1933 agreement with Reza Shah to give laborers better pay and more chance for advancement, nor had it built the schools, hospitals, roads, or telephone system it promised. Manucher Farmanfarmaian, who in 1949 became director of Iran's petroleum institute, was appalled by what he found at Abadan:”
― Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men

“About 90 percent of the one billion Muslims in the world today identify with the Sunni tradition. Of the remainder, most are Shiites, the largest number of whom are in Iran.”
― Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

“nations just as it breaks the will of human beings.”
― Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

“Acheson immediately understood the urgency of this message. He summoned Ambassador Franks and told him that the United States resolutely opposed “the use of force or the threat of the use of force” against Iran, and that Truman himself had “stressed most strongly that no situation should be allowed to develop into an armed conflict between a body of British troops and the Persian forces.”
― Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror