When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste.

[Indira Gandhi] looked tired that day, and all of a sudden I exclaimed, 'Deep down I don't envy you, and I shouldn't like to be in your place.' And she said, 'The problem is not in the problems I have, it's in the idiots around me. Democracy, you know...' I now wonder what she meant by that unfinished phrase.

There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.

I don't want to hear about my death.

Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.

I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.

Henry Kissinger may have wished I had presented him as a combination of Charles DeGaulle and Disraeli, but I didn't....out of respect for DeGaulle and Disraeli. I described him as a cowboy because that is how he describes himself. If I were a cowboy I would be offended.