Azar Nafisi Quotes

My parents realized the dangers of raising a daughter in a social, political, and legal climate that was growing increasingly oppressive toward women and girls. Although they fled to London when I was just three weeks old, the challenges facing women's rights in Iran became ingrained in my social consciousness.

I don't know what kind of courage it took thousands of years ago, but I know how courageous women need to be today.

For women in, say, Alabama, 'feminism' is a dirty word. They would never march in the streets. But although they don't think of themselves as the beneficiaries of feminism, they are.

The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress.

Bourgeois society is not fundamentally opposed to the bourgeois women's movement, which is proven by the fact that in various states reforms of private and public laws concerning women have been initiated.

Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however.

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.

If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.

… it is not sufficient to change laws, institutions and customs. It is essential that women acquire ‘a new skin’. This can occur only through a collective effort while women suffer and loathe the oppression of men; it does not follow that her ovaries condemn her to be on her knees for eternity.

The history of women has been a history of silence.

I'lI say this: I recall entering Congress in 1971 and being called a 'feminist' by members of my own party as if it was a dirty word. They didn't realize that I wore that label as a badge of honor.

With each generation, women's ability to live the lives they choose reaches a place their grandmothers never thought possible. But that doesn't mean everything is perfect or that our work is finished.

We need to stop refighting 40-year old battles on women's rights.

We always had a lot of admiration for feminists who were out there trying to change things for the better for women, who were trying to find equality in the workplace and at home.

If you have a slave around the house how can you expect to make a revolution outside it? The problem for women is that if we try to be free, then we naturally become lonely, because so many women are willing to become slaves, and men usually prefer that.

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women - of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

What some men don't understand is that by opposing policies to reduce violence, promote equal pay and universal healthcare and voting to limit access to contraception and legal abortion, they are relegating women to another century, a time when men ruled exclusively and women were considered property and had to be guided by a firm masculine hand.

... so long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon; with one face (the man's face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was disc or sphere.

Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant what I fear it still means to some men in our own day - respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort.

The only thing the women were after was just the chance to help the world on. But some men were so dreadfully afraid of them that they refused to understand, and talked about 'shrieking sisterhoods' and 'disappointed spinsters' and rubbish of that sort.

Woman has so long been subject to the disabilities and restrictions with which her progress has been embarrassed that she has become enervated, her mind to some extent paralyzed; and like those still more degraded by personal bondage she hugs her chains.

We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.

All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.