Farah Diba Quotes

I wanted to preserve the old buildings, not to destroy them and build something new.

Iranian women are very courageous and active, even with all the oppression.

There are many people inside Iran who say, "We don't have enough to eat. Why do we need a nuclear bomb?"

There are many Iranians working at NASA. One of the engineers involved with the spaceship that went to Mars is an Iranian.

I hope in the end there will be a solution for the world, because we have advanced in so many ways, and still the world has so many different problems.

I hope that things will change, because it's a pity that a country like Iran is not where it should be, or where it has been historically. It's important for Iran, for all of the Middle East, and also for the rest of the world.

I was never interested in money. I always looked down on it. But now that I have less money, I see that without money, you cannot do much. Everything in the end is about money.

I always want to remain positive. In our long history, Iran has been invaded by so many other countries and despite it all, the Iranian identity has survived. People are very courageous, especially the women, who are braver than the men.

You cannot expect a foreign country to be more Catholic than the pope for you.

I remember I went to an exhibition somewhere and one of the artists, an Iranian lady, said, "I wish we had somewhere that our paintings would stay forever." So this idea came to me. I said, "She's right, we should have a place to keep them, and not only Iranian art works, but also of foreign artists."

Of course, I didn't become an architect, but later on in Iran, I had a lot of contact and discussions with architects because Iran was developing, and I felt we shouldn't destroy the past and copy completely the West, which is the problem in developing countries.

Some Iranian doctors from Europe and America go to Iran and operate for free or teach medical students there. The other day, I met a gentlemen who is helping to protect wildlife in Iran. It's good that many of them don't forget about their country. It's important.

I believe in freedom for women to have equal rights - the right to work, the right to hold high positions, the right to take custody of their children after divorcing.

It's normal that countries work for their own benefit, political and economic.

Monarchies are above political parties. Sometimes political parties do things that are to the disadvantage of the country because they want to beat the other party. In Iran, where we have different religions and ethnic groups, it was a unifying factor.

You have to judge everybody on balance, all the positives and all the negatives. In the life of my husband, I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

In Iran, as in all developing countries, they wanted to copy the outside world, without knowing what was good for our own country.

Fanaticism exists in every religion, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim.