Every culture has something to be ashamed of, but every culture also has the right to change, to challenge negative traditions, and create to new ones.

The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream.

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.

Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.

In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture.

I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture - as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they like to be married at the age of nine.