Tunisian Quotes & Sayings

I think it is extremely important that the West support this experiment [of Tunisian democracy] with investment, with aid, with symbolic support, not just flows of democracy assistance ... If Tunisia can't make it, what are the prospects for the rest of the Arab world? — Larry Diamond

I had never heard of the little Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. And yet, that's where it all began. With an ordinary incident, one that happens frequently, but so frequently that it finally started something unstoppable. — John Freeman

The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents. — Rebecca MacKinnon

Rulers like Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser started subsidizing bread as a way to buy loyalty, or at least obedience, and this system became so pervasive that the Tunisian scholar Larbi Sadiki described countries who used it as dimuqratiyyat al-khubz - "democracies of bread." But the problem with this system of offering bread in exchange for genuine democracy is that it can never last - sooner or later, the bread will run out, and people will start demanding bread and roses too. — Annia Ciezadlo

Writing and giving voice to what I am feeling makes me happy. And supporting people in finding their voice, passion, outrage and resistance. There is nothing better than that. — Eve Ensler

Under Tunisian law, a woman can divorce her husband. Total equality. — Rashid Al-Ghannushi

Libya. A Tunisian street vendor setting himself aflame to protest police brutality in December 2010 ushered in what has become known as the Arab Spring. Mass demonstrations protesting longstanding authoritarian rule in Egypt, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Libya in 2011 stirred national and international debates. — Karen A. Mingst

As in Pakistan, Tunisian and Egyptian human rights activists are concerned that any censorship mechanisms, once put in place, will inevitably be abused for political purposes no matter what censorship proponents claim to the contrary. — Rebecca MacKinnon

I couldn't know about my culture, my history, without learning the language, so I started learning Arabic - reading, writing. I used to speak Arabic before that, but Tunisian Arabic dialect. Step by step, I discovered calligraphy. I painted before and I just brought the calligraphy into my artwork. That's how everything started. The funny thing is the fact that going back to my roots made me feel French. — EL Seed

Most of the doctors in the Tunisian administration, especially those in country districts, contracted typhus and approximately one third of them died of it. — Charles Jules Henry Nicole

Cloves

Where is the scent of cloves coming from?
her hair?
armpit?
or her dress
thrown on the Tunisian rug?
From the third step in the house?
Layla
makes everything smell of cloves.
Layla
is the orchard when it's wet.
She is
what the orchard breathes
when it's watered at night.
Layla knows now
that I am drunk with the scent of cloves,
she stiches together my clouds
and then scatters them together
in a sky like a sheet
as she clasps me.
Layla
feels that my fingers are numb,
over the dunes she knows
my pulse is hers,
my water is hers.
Layla
leaves me sleeping,
rocking between clouds
and cloves. — Saadi Youssef

Recognizing a persimmon is no great feat, for God's sake," I said. "They look like orange baseballs!" "And they taste like the bottom of a chamber pot," Jamie added, — Diana Gabaldon

An ordinary Turk, an ordinary Arab, an ordinary Tunisian can change history. We believe that democracy is good, and that our people deserve it. — Ahmet Davutoglu

A Dear John haiku:

This isn't working.
I hope we can still be friends.
Please don't kill my cat. — Tom Dheere

The danger of leaving overwhelming wealth and power in the grasp of a small minority is a lesson that leaders such as ousted Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have learned a little too late, as the demonstrations across the Arab world indicate. — Graydon Carter

Tunisian liberals say that the U.S. Embassy in Tunis is unengaged with their efforts to make sure the Tunisian model remains one of expanding freedom. — Elliott Abrams

The Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment, and general recession. The Tunisian revolution is not far from us. The Arab citizen entered an unprecedented state of anger and frustration. — Amr Moussa

If you just look at the fact that a woman was central in twittering the Cairo revolution, and women were central to the Tunisian uprising. Women are at the center of everything right now and moving everything forward. And I do think in the next year or two, we are going to see such a woman spring, such a rising. — Eve Ensler

Heaven is not the wide blue sky but the place where corporeality is begotten in the house of the Creative. — Lu Yen-hsun

Now, Benny was no eejit. He wasn't expecting the Tunisian nationals to be Irish. What he did expect was darkish people with Irishy personalities.
That was not what he got.
The Tunisians weren't interested in conforming to Benny's preconceptions. They stubbornly insisted on being themselves. — Eoin Colfer

You think that social media is about hooking up online? For these kids [in the Tunisian Revolution], it was a military tool to defend unarmed people from murderers. — Don Tapscott

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date. — Roger Von Oech

When actually, you have one identity made of different parts. Depending on where you are, at what time in your life, some things are higher or deeper. That's what I understood later: that I'm French and Tunisian, and I'm accepting the French part of my identity. — EL Seed

In a broader sense, the value of heirlooms is always, as I have said, an historical value, derived from acts of production, use, or appropriation that have involved the object in the past. The value of an heirloom is really that of actions: actions whose significance has been, as it were, absorbed into the object's current identity - whether the emphasis is placed on the inspired labors of the artist who created it, the lengths to which some people have been known to go to acquire it, or the fact that it was once used to cut off a mythical giant's head. Since the value of the actions has already been fixed in the physical being of the object, it is perhaps a short leap to begin attributing the agency behind such actions to the object as well, and speak, as Mauss does, of valuables that transfer themselves from owner to owner or actively influence their owners' fates. The — David Graeber