You cannot bring democracy to a country by attacking it.

If you look at the discourse before the revolution, whether it is the left communist, whether it is the right secularist...the entirety of this discourse was such that it encouraged the kind of ascendancy for a man like Ayatollah Khomeini.

It began early in the revolution. It was a process that was unfolding on a daily basis. We expected the system to be dispensing justice, but every day that passed by, we recognized that the justice we expected and hoped for was not about to be achieved.

We've had 60 years of intellectual development in Iran. How can we have the same system? Even theories of secularism are constantly being revised and changed.

Let me begin by saying not only you can't have democracy with $75 million. You can't even have it with $750 billion.

I did join the Revolutionary Guard, but I was simply a simple Revolutionary Guard, never a commander.

[In] every revolution, there is a great divergence between what the revolutionaries expect and what the revolution actually accomplishes.