Azar Nafisi

One of the things that made the Islamic regime so intolerable was what it did to its citizens morally and spiritually, draining us of our sense of right or wrong, making us complicit even in the crimes committed against us.

“It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer),” he wrote, in “Nothing Personal,” “to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant.”

tried to tell her about how angry I had been and how worried I was that anger would be the only feeling I would have; that I would be unable to turn my hatred into something constructive. She said that I was overintellectualizing and that I should say what I’d just told her to the families of the 1,500 people killed by the regime in the November 2019 protests. “People are angry,” she said. “That is all they have. Let us not try to take that away from them.”