"I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?"

-- Azar Nafisi

#Children Quotes #Giving Up Quotes #Pain Quotes

“I own my own company, so I've never had businessmen telling me what to do or getting worried if something doesn't sell. I've always had my own access to the public, because I started off making my clothes for a little shop and so I've always had people buying them.”
“The real minimum wage is zero.”
“The early church didn’t say, ‘Look what the world is coming to!’ They said, ‘Look what has come into the world’!”
“I'm not excusing crime or those who bring poison into the community, but I do want brothers and sisters in prison to know someone cares.”
“I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.”
“We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.”
“Shane - who knows about Shane? Planet Shane is a lovely place a long way from here.”
“I believe that if you don't derive a deep sense of purpose from what you do, if you don't come radiantly alive several times a day, if you don't feel deeply grateful at the tremendous good fortune that has been bestowed on you, then you are wasting your life. And life is too short to waste.”

You may also like:

Anousheh Ansari
Engineer
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Activist
Hamid Dabashi
Professor
Marjane Satrapi
Novelist
Shahrnush Parsipur
Novelist
Shirin Ebadi
Lawyer
Simin Daneshvar
Novelist
Vladimir Nabokov
Novelist
Azadeh Moaveni
Journalist