4 Quotes by Payam Akhavan

Suffering is not some big idea in the sky. It is a lived experience, a profound knowledge, scattered across the many sites of sorrow that I have witnessed. Feeling injustice is the only means of understanding justice: stories, both enchanting and heartbreaking, are the only means of knowing why our dignity matters. This then is a story among stories, a glimpse of our shared longing to redeem irredeemable loss, a tale of how wounds open us to search in darkness for the dawn of a better world.

Today we demand justice for the oppressed. We no longer accept atrocities as the inescapable fate of the defenceless. We desire and expect a better future. But when confronted with the enormity of injustice and what it demands of us, we retreat into the familiar ritual of intellectualization and moral posturing, recycling lofty liberal ideals from a safe distance. We avoid the intimate knowledge of suffering without which we will never understand the imperative of human rights.

The problem with the world is not a shortage of brilliant theories or feel-good slogans. The problem is that we confuse proliferation of progressive terminology with profound empathy and purposeful engagement.

There can be no meaningful change if we choose to look down at the arena of anguish from thirty thousand feet.