Azar Nafisi Quotes

Fortunately somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

Freedom of expression and speech is guaranteed for everyone. However, the excessive use of this right … could represent a threat to social peace and the country’s best interest.

My imagination can do whatever it wants to do. This gives me a great sense of freedom.

Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?

I think about freedom and the urgency around our imagination. If you can't imagine it, you can't fight for it.

I pray, read the word, and then creative stuff happens here. Problem-solving and all of that comes into that space. So 'Da Box' actually represents my sanctuary and that time. I might look trapped in a box, but I'm actually more free in that box than anyone on the outside looking in or in any other space in my life.

To me, that is really fundamental to social justice: to have choices in life.

Thankfully, I don't think you can be creative without being free.

I like listening to ambient music, especially in very scenic places because I think it allows for the most freedom of thought.

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

I have a personal belief that you never have to give up liberty for security. You can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights.

The pursuit of happiness is an overview kind of thing. It's not in the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans.

Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. . . . Imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.

I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th century straitjacket, unsuited for this age...The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today.

Being liberated means reading what you want to read, and fantasizing about what you want to fantasize about.

You in the media ought to be ashamed of yourselves to call the provisions and the guarantees of the Bill of Rights 'Technicalities'. They're not. We are what we are because of those guarantees.

I'll not punish you for having an imagination.

He who passes not his days in the realm of dreams is the slave of the days.

I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason... Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

The belief in potential human virtue underlies the whole idea of the Bill of Rights; the document is a very tough guardian of that belief.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you'll be free if you truly wish to be.

Without freedom, there is no creation.

After all, all we demanded was a right to twinkle.