Oriana Fallaci Quotes

The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.

I'm Machiavelli's offspring, I'm the king of New York, king of the coast, one hand, I juggle them both.

Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.

The Ayatollah of the Assembly.

A king, from being a father to his people, degenerates into a tyrant, and forfeits all right to obedience.

A dictator is often a revolutionary who has made a name for himself. A revolutionary is often a bourgeois who hasn't.

Prior to his takeover of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini was camping near Paris, giving daily news conferences to a fawning international press corps without a murmur of complaint to France from the United States about the disaster it was coddling in the incredibly naive liberal belief that this extremist cleric would be an improvement over the Shah.

A people may let a king fall and still remain a people, but if a king let his people slip from him, he is no longer a king.

No one is king by his own power.

When you strike at a king, you must kill him.

Nothing appears more surprising ... than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

One who takes on the humiliation of the State Is called a Ruler: worthy of offering sacrifices to the gods of earth millet; One who takes on himself the calamity of the State Is called a King: worthy of dominion over the entire Empire.

Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.

He made you king to do justice and righteousness.

Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; or unto governors

A younger generation of Iranians, whose worldviews were forged in the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq War, have come to power, wielding a more fervently ideological approach to politics than their predecessors. The children of the Revolution are now its leaders.

I go still further and affirm, that, supposing even a nation had been really willing to grant their sovereign an arbitrary and unlimited power, this concession would of itself be void and of no effect.

It is certain that, so soon as the people submit to a king, really such, they have no longer the supreme power.

The instinct to command others, in its primitive essence, is a carnivorous, altogether bestial and savage instinct. Under the influence of the mental development of man, it takes on a somewhat more ideal form and becomes somewhat ennobled, presenting itself as the instrument of reason and the devoted servant of that abstraction, or political fiction, which is called the public good

No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand.

What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?

If men's minds were as easily controlled as their tongues, every king would sit safely on his throne

I almost think were I to win some small success now, I could become dictator.

Maintaining legitimacy in an authoritarian state is very difficult.

[Martin Luther] King has no competence to speak about complex matters of foreign policy…. It is nothing short of arrogance when Dr. King takes it upon himself to thus undermine the policies of the United States ….