He who has a one year intent, plants grain,
if the intent is ten years, then a tree.
He who has a hundred year intent, educates a person. Amir Kabir
(Iran's Chief Minister 1848-52)
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کسی که نیت یک
ساله دارد، گندم می کارد
و آن که دهساله، درخت مینشاند و
آن که صد ساله، آدم تربیت میکند
میرزا تقی خان امیر کبیر
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To all who by their thought, or word,
or deed
Have aided Persia in her hour of need,
Whether by tongue, or pen, or sword they wrought,
Whether they strove or suffered, spoke or fought,
Whether their services were small or great,
This book of mine I humbly dedicate.
May these approve my poor attempt to trace
This final effort of an ancient race
To burst its bondage, caste aside its chain,
And rise to life 'a Nation once again.'
Dedication page by Professor Edwarde
G. Brown
n his The Persian Revolution 1905-1909
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Morgan Shuster's observation of Iran's Constitutional
Revolution of 1906:
"I believe that there has never been in the history of the
world
an instance where a
people
changed suddenly from an absolute
monarchy to a constitutional or representative
form
of
government
and at once succeeded in
displaying a high standard of political
wisdom
and knowledge of legislative
procedure"
The Strangulation of Persia, pp.240.
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"A revolution is a mighty devourer of human energy,
both
individual and collective.
The nerves give way .
Consciousness is
shaken and characters are worn out.
Events
unfold too swiftly for the flow
of fresh forces
to replace the loss.
Hunger, unemployment,
the death
of
the revolutionary cadres, the removal
of the masses
from administration, all
this led to such a physical and
moral
impoverishment of the Parisian suburbs
that they
required three decades before
they were ready for a new
insurrection"
Leon Trotsky on the Great French Revolution in
Revolution
Betrayed, pp38-89
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Theodore Rothstein, the Soviet ambassador to Iran in 1921,
is
known to
have
made the
following sardonic comment about
Iranian statesmen:
"Persia is fundamentally sound. They will take money
from
everybody. From
the
British today from the Russians tomorrow
or b from
the French or the Germans
or
anyone else.
But they will never do anything
for the money. You may
buy
their
country from them six times over but you
will never get
it. I say Persia
can
never
go under. Persia is fundamentally sound."
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Abbas Mirza Qajar was the crown prince
of
Fath Ali Shah, the second
Qajar king; Abbas
Mirza died in 1834 at the age of 43, never
becoming
king; but he was the governor of
Azarbaijan (seated in Tabriz) and as
such in
charge of Qajar
Iran's defense of the Caucasus
(qafqaz) in the
two
Russo-Iranian wars which
resulted in the Golestan (1813) and
Turkmanchai
(1828) treaties and loss of
the region; he was also
Iran's
first modern
reformer, attempting to modernize
the Qajar military and
administration. In
1805, in a
conversation with
Napoleon Bonapart's
representative
to Iran, Abbas Mirza went on record asking,
with
lamentation,
the following question; remember this
was when he was losing
badly to the
Russians despite
his best, brave efforts; see if you care to answer
it:
"What is the power that gives [Europe]
so great a
superiority over us?
What is the cause of your
progress and of our constant
weakness?
You know
the art of governing, the art of conquering, the art
of putting
into action all human faculties, whereas
we seem condemned to vegetate
in
a shameful
ignorance..."
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What is to be done, O Moslems? For I do not recognize myself.
I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Zoroastrian,
nor Moslem.
I am not of the East, nor of the West, nor
of the land, nor of the sea;
I am nor of Nature's mint, nor
of the circling heavens.
I am not of this world, nor of the
next, nor of Heaven, nor of Hell;
I am not of Adam, nor
of Eve, nor of Eden and Paradise.
My place is the placeless,
my trace is the traceless;
It is neither body or soul, for I
belong to the soul of the Beloved.
*******
Come, come whoever you are.
Wanderer, idolater, worshipper of fire,
Come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times
Come, and come yet again.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
*******
A heart that circles round the door of love
Will die, at last, by the dagger of love
This point is written in the book of love
He has no head at all whose head holds love
Mowlana Jalal al-Din Mohammad
Balkhi (Rumi)
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Ibn Khaldun, the renown Arab historian of the 14th
century
and author of Muqadama (Introduction to
History), reported
the following remark attributed
to the Prophet of Islam:
"If scholarship hung suspended in the highest part of
the heavens, the Persians would attain it."
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"Feeble, insignificant thinking is seldom concise.
It is
wordy...[and] endlessly circles
around a subject
because it cannot seem
to touch, perhaps dies not really
want to touch,
the subject it has
condemned itself to express.
The more protracted the babble, the
thinner
the meaning
and the more treacherous its condensation."
Ernest Bloch in his study of Hegel
سـخنِ سـست و بی مقدار به نـدرت مختصرست. با
پُرگـویی، بی هدف دایره وار پیرامون موضوع
می گرد د چرا کـه بـه نظر نمی آیـد قادر
باشـد ، یـا شاید هم بـه واقـع نمی خواهد، موضوعی را
که خود را محکـوم به بیانِ آن
می داند لمس کند.
هر چـه نامفهوم گویی طولانـی تر، معنیِ آن
سـطحی تر و خلاصه
کردن آن عذاب آورترست
ارنسـت بلـوخ در تـحقیقات هگلـی اش
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Hafez, never kiss but thy lover's
lips and the wine
cup's rim
For it is wrong to kiss that hands of
those who sell (claim) piety
Hafez of Shiraz
مـبـوس جز لب معشوق و جام مـی حافظ
کـه دست زُهـد فـروشـان خـطاست بوسیدن
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"Besides, death itself is not frightening; it is the
moment
before
death, that
horrible last instant.
That is true not just for the
cowardly but also for the
brave, even for those of whom it is
commonly said
'He looks death square in the eye'"
Anna Larina widow of Nikolai Bukharin the Bolshevik leader
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"Faced by the mountainous heap of the minutiae
of knowledge and
awed by the watchful severity
of his colleagues, the modern
historian
too often
take refuge in learned article or narrowly
specialized
dissertations. I believe that
the supreme duty of the
historian is to write history, that is
to say, to
attempt
to record in
one sweeping sequence
the greater events
and movements that have swayed the destinies of man"
Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades.
(Introduction)
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"Extremism is so easy. You've got
your position,
and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when
you
go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots
coming around from
the left."
Clint Eastwood
"The saddest thing I can imagine is
to get
used to luxury."
"Words are cheap. The biggest thing
you
can say is 'elephant'."
"Life is a tragedy when seen in
close-up,
but a comedy in long shot."
Chaplin
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