Azar Nafisi Quotes

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

When a country loses its identity, it no longer knows what it is or where it comes from and what its real worth is. So it dissolves.

There's a distinct American culture that evolved from the United States founding, and that is what made America great, is what allowed the human being to become.

Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

Let us not suffer from a national amnesia that causes us to forget who and what we are.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.

On a certain level, I don't think there is an answer to what the American way is, because it is constantly being re-defined. It's also been exploited and capitalized upon and politicized by one side or the other to the point that a certain degree of cynicism has attached itself to that term.

We are not America. We are Afghanistan.

There is no nation in the world greater, older or more honorable than the Turkish nation, nor has one been seen in the history of humanity.

When the culture dies, the country dies.

Each generation of Americans must define what it means to be an American.

Nobody is sure what our culture is or whether we even have a national culture at all.

There goes traditional America.

The appellation of a Scottish Bard is by far my highest pride; to continue to deserve it is my most exalted ambition.

We're Americans. It's a culture. We should defend that culture, and we should reinforce that culture.

When the faith dies, the culture it produced begins to die, then the civilization goes, and, then, the population.

People looked up to us for our values and leadership. But today, they laugh as we are busy debating whether one of the seven wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal, was actually built by Indians.

'Authentic' is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?

Europe's greatest problem is cultural relativism. This has led to a situation where Europeans no longer know what they should be proud of and who they really are because a so-called liberal and leftist-imposed concept says that all cultures are the same.

Obviously, I would have been happier if Canada had not been conquered in the past by the English, if this part of North America had remained French, but you can't rewrite history.

We need to define what culture is. Every human being lives within a culture, and culture means "To grow in." It means to literally fall, and this is exactly what I believe is happening all around us right now.

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.