"Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors."

“Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.”

“Contraceptives unlock one of the most dormant, but potentially powerful assets in development: women as decision-makers. When women have the power to make choices about their families, they tend to decide precisely what demographers, economists, and development experts recommend. They invest in the long-term human capital of their families.”

“The audience is the best judge of anything. They cannot be lied to. Truth brings them closer. A moment that lags - they're gonna cough.”

“If a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.”

“The real past can traumatize us, but so can the real future.”

“It seems that in the world of politics, lying is not such a big deal.”

Source : "Secretary of Iranian Supreme council for National Security, Ali Larijani: if the European countries impose sanctions, they will be more harmed than us; if you toy with our national pride, you will face a firm response". Press conference aired on the Iranian News Channel (IRINN), www.memri.org. February 1, 2006.

“There is no love, there is only the lie we tell ourselves that things are more important than they actually are, that our lives will have meaning beyond all the other lives that have come before us and been forgotten, that there is hope in any of this.”

“You always draw on your experiences with live audiences to know how to do comedy on films. You're working for a laugh that may or may not come six months later, but you're working in a vacuum at the time you are doing it.”