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Maybe they [women who were executed by the Taliban] were guilty of the worst of all crimes: to laugh. Yes. Laughing. I said laughter. Didn't you know that with the Taliban in Afghanistan women can't laugh, that they are even forbidden to laugh?.

— Oriana Fallaci The Rage and the Pride (2002)

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More quotes by Oriana Fallaci

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.

The Rage and the Pride (2002)

The first thought a Western woman has when she arrives in a rigorously Muslim country like Pakistan is that she appears to be the only woman to have survived a tsunami that has washed away all the others.

What's the point anyway — Of suffering, dying? It teaches us to live, boy. A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives.

A Man (1979)

Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense.

Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called "objectivity." Objectivity does not exist. The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only.

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Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Albert Einstein Essay to Leo Baeck (1953)

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth The Harper Book of Quotations (1993)

Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt,
And every grin so merry draws one out.

John Wolcot

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Oriana Fallaci (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.