Shirin Ebadi Quotes

Part of the Koran is a license for oppression.

Religion is never the problem; it's the people who use it to gain power.

You have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject.

The Taliban has not really studied Islam…They only know jihad and fighting… they are using the name of Islam for their purposes

Nadine Gordimer came over just before she died. She didn't want to talk about books or the arts, but about the abuse of the constitution by the government.

Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now.

When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people … the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.

Islam does not require a war against … homosexuals. Gays are sexual perverts who should be thrown from a high place.

In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox have formed a partisan bloc able to manipulate the political system even as it makes little effort to hide its contempt for secular democracy …. Israel is plagued by fundamentalism, but the country does not exist in a vacuum. Extremism is a disease that has infected its whole neighborhood, and the countries surrounding Israel suffer from far worse cases of it.

… the religion’s [Islam’s] teachings don’t involve acts of terrorism unless — as with every other religion — leaders manipulate the teachings to make whatever they want.

Islam and freedom are not compatible.

We need to understand the difference between freedom of religion - which is absolutely guaranteed and I would fervently defend. Sharia law is politics; it's not religion. If you say that a woman is voluntarily going to be of lesser value than a man, which is in sharia law, can we allow that?

These statements about torture, about alleged misuse of power and things like that, insulted the Filipinos more than their leader because it was made to appear as if Filipinos would tolerate a leader who would torture his own people, who would utilize his executive prerogatives for abuses.

I have traveled a lot in the world, and wherever Islam is in charge, it's just terrible.

In one notorious episode in 2002, in the holy city of Mecca, the religious police prevented girls from fleeing a school that was on fire because they were not properly dressed.

The policies and laws executed by the grand mufti in Libya, the long-term agenda in the short-lived Morsi government in Egypt, and by ISIS in its ideal Islamist Ummah are incompatible with the Constitution, period.

Because I play in the NBA, I am lucky enough to have a public platform, so I've used every opportunity to make sure everyone knows about Erdogan's cruelty and disdain for human rights.

After I got arrested the Filipino government unshackled me. I knew first-hand how they violated my rights and I could speak about that from experience.

The problem with religious doctrine, as with politics, because of its ability to give people authority, it has a tendency to attract people that want authority for all the wrong reasons, and that is what it has done across all time.

My duty is to call for free elections because there is an abuse of power, and we live in a dictatorship.

When a government forcibly holds enough people indefinitely without trial, it evokes the kinds of raids, detention, and abuses of power associated with authoritarian states - or darker periods in American history.

Islamic State practise a brand of Islamic law so strict that apparently Raqqa only has two Irish Pubs.

We Catholics have been in the forefront in defending the dignity of the human person. Clericalism is a direct violation of human dignity.

If someone is supporting Sharia, that is doing something wrong.

I think every religion is founded with good intentions, but with any good thing, there's a negative use for it.