Ayatollah Quotes & Sayings

The West found an excuse for every incident and boxed and labeled it under the context of the country in which it took place. They attributed Iran's conflict and the victory of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini to an inner conflict within Iran. They considered the Lebanese war a civil war among factions. They considered the overall Arab-Israeli conflict a Palestinian-versus-Israeli conflict over land. Yet in all these conflicts radical Islam was the driving force or lingered just under the surface. — Brigitte Gabriel

In art class at school we learned how to draw tanks and soldiers opening fire at [Iranian leader Ayatollah] Khomeini and his beard. They didn't teach us the names of the flowers that grew around us in the city - wild flowers of all kinds and all colors. The math teacher used to whip the kids with his trouser belt. My father was constantly violent toward my mother for the most trivial reasons. — Hassan Blasim

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism. — Jerry Saltz

While I would champion any campaign to support Muslim women who do not wish to cover. I would now also protest vigorously for the right of a woman to wear that covering, if it is what she wants and believes in. Ayatollah Khomeini and Jacques Chirac have much more in common than either of them would care to acknowledge. Each tried to solve overarching social problems by imposing his will on the bodies of women. — Geraldine Brooks

I am the Ayatollah of rock 'n' rolla — Chris Jericho

Repeatedly and frankly we have announced that in Irans national security doctrine there is no room for atomic and chemical weapons as we consider them against Islamic laws. Irans Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei) in this connection had issued a decree that mass destruction weapons are prohibited by the Muslim religion. [ ... ] Therefore we support the idea of a Middle East free from weapons of mass destruction[.] — Ali Larijani

Roger Ailes said, we learned from a secret back channel that the ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president. — Michel Martin

Some labeled Jerry Falwell an American version of the Ayatollah Khomeni. People for the American Way, a group organized to counter the Moral Majority, launched a slick media campaign attaching the Nazi slur to the religious right. — Charles Colson

Lecturing the assembled publicists and stylists, my mom says that if any aboriginal peoples or primitive tribe still does not celebrate her acting, that's only because those subjugated native cultures find themselves oppressed by an evil, fundamentalist form of religion. Their budding appreciation of her films is obviously being quashed by some devilish imam or patriarchal ayatollah or witch doctor. — Chuck Palahniuk

This mixture of political and geographical considerations compounded Saddam's failure to grasp the operational requirements of such a campaign. Rather than allowing his forces to advance until their momentum was exhausted, he voluntarily halted their advance within a week of the onset of hostilities and then announced his willingness to negotiate a settlement. This decision not to capitalise on Iraq's early military successes by applying increased pressure had a number of dire consequences which, in turn, led to the reversal of the course of the war. It saved the Iranian army from a decisive defeat and gave Tehran precious time to re-organise and regroup; and it had a devastating impact on the morale of the Iraqi army and hence on its combat performance. Above all, the limited Iraqi invasion did nothing to endanger the revolutionary regime, nor to drive Ayatollah Khomeini towards moderation. — Efraim Karsh

The danger of Iran is if you listen to what the Ayatollah is saying, to what the Mullahs are saying, rational self-preservation is not their objective. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon the odds are unacceptably high that that weapon will not be simply stockpiled, but it will be detonated over Tel Aviv, or New York, or Los Angeles. — Ted Cruz

The war against jihadism has been chronically misunderstood because of our failure to acknowledge the religious motives of Muslim jihadists. This failure began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Trapped in our Western secularist paradigms, we interpreted the uprising against the Shah as an anti-colonial revolt against a "brutal" autocrat propped up by the West for its own exploitative economic and geostrategic purposes. The aim of the revolution, the argument went, was to create a government more sympathetic to national sovereignty and Western pluralistic government. However, it soon became clear with the political triumph of the Ayatollah Khomeini that the revolution was in the main a religious one, inspired in part by anger at the Shah's secularization, modernization, and liberalization policies. As Khomeini said in 1962, the Shah's regime was "fundamentally opposed to Islam itself and the existence of a religious class. — Anonymous

I can understand that if you have sold arms to the ayatollah why you might not be quite as sensitive to the need to get assault weapons off our streets. — Chuck Robb

I'd probably try to stop the rain forests from being cut down.
I'd probably join the revolution down south somewhere and try to save my life on the planet Earth.
I might go to Libya. I might go see the Ayatollah. I might go to France, catch somebody in France I'm upset with. — Charles Manson

I thought using the Ayatollah's money to support the Nicaraguan resistance was a neat idea. — Oliver North

The Islamic Revolution of Iran is honourable for it is the cry which has its origin in Ayatollah Khomeini's conscience. — Ruhollah Khomeini

Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed. — Azar Nafisi

Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammed Khatami condemned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain terms and Iranians held vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran...or the help Iran gave to the US-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or the Iranian offer for substantial talks following the fall of Baghdad in the Spring of 2003. — Robert D. Kaplan

The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini. — Salman Rushdie

Prior to his takeover of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini was camping near Paris, giving daily news conferences to a fawning international press corps without a murmur of complaint to France from the United States about the disaster it was coddling in the incredibly naive liberal belief that this extremist cleric would be an improvement over the Shah. — Alexander Haig

The ayatollah in Iran says he believes that he got the letter, but he thinks he accidentally threw it out with his Crate & Barrel catalog. — David Letterman

That's true," said Gabriel. "The American president writes love letters to the ayatollah. And us . . ." He gave an indifferent shrug of his shoulders but said nothing more. — Daniel Silva

It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, a truthless monster with the brains of a king rat and the soul of a cockroach, is about to be sworn in as the president of the United States for the next four years ... And he will bring his gang in with him, a mean network of lawyers and salesmen and pimps who will loot the national treasury, warp the laws, mock the rules and stay awake 22 hours a day looking for at least one reason to declare war, officially, on some hapless tribe in the Sahara or heathen fanatic like the Ayatollah Khomeini. — Hunter S. Thompson

The Iranians don't want the same thing we do in Iraq, not really; they want to control Iraq ... the Ayatollah hates the United States; the Iranians are enemies of the United States. — Elliott Abrams

They have no business administering government policies in a country that favors freedom and equality ... Can you imagine having the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as defense minister, or Mahatma Gandhi as minister of health, education, and welfare The Hindu and Buddhist idea of karma and the Muslim idea of kismet, or fate condemn the poor and the disabled to their suffering ... It's the will of Allah. These beliefs are nothing but abject fatalism, and they would devastate the social gains this nation has made if they were ever put into practice. — Pat Robertson

This democracy ... The elections in Iraq were held despite the American opposition. It was the will of the Iraqi people and the religious authorities. [The elections] were the result of pressure by Ayatollah Sistani, by the Iraqi religious authorities, and by the fighting forces in Iraq on America. They left the US no choice but to allow the elections. — Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

When the Islamic revolution began in 1979 under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, it aroused considerable admiration in the Arab street. It presented a model of organised popular action that deposed one of the region's most tyrannical regimes. The people of the region discerned in this revolution new hope for freedom and change. — Wadah Khanfar

Welcome to RAW is Jericho! And I was just listening to your list of problems and grievances that you have with all my Jerichoholics, and I have a solution - and that solution is to SHUT THE HELL UP. But finally, Al Snow, tomorrow people WILL be acknowledging you - they WILL be talking about the greatest moment of '99 - they'll be talking about the night that Al Snow was brutally beaten by the Ayatollah of Rock n Rolla. — Chris Jericho

A year later, Ayatollah Bennett declared, "I find no merit in the [drug] legalizers' case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument." Of course, what this dangerous comedian thinks is moral James Madison and the Virginia statesman and Rights-man George Mason would have thought dangerous nonsense, particularly when his "morality" abolishes their gift to all of us, the Bill of Rights. — Gore Vidal