Daily Inspiration Quote by Ayatollah Khomeini

Khomeini’s phrase is doing two pieces of political theater at once: mythmaking and mobilization. Calling Americans “the great Satan” plugs a contemporary geopolitical foe into a religious cosmology where the enemy isn’t just wrong but corrupting, seductive, and structurally opposed to divine order. It’s a shortcut past policy debate. If the adversary is Satan, compromise becomes contamination.

Then comes the twist: “the wounded snake.” That image softens none of the menace; it sharpens it. A wounded snake is most dangerous precisely because it’s hurt: unpredictable, vindictive, still capable of striking. The subtext is strategic. The United States is cast as a formidable power that has been weakened - by revolutionary defiance, by the humiliation of losing Iran, by perceived moral decay - and therefore more likely to lash out. It’s propaganda with a security argument embedded inside: stay vigilant, expect retaliation, treat any outreach as a feint.

Context matters. In the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the new Islamic Republic needed cohesion across factions, a unifying narrative that could outcompete leftist and nationalist alternatives. Anti-Americanism offered a clean adhesive, supercharged by memories of the 1953 CIA-backed coup and the Shah’s U.S. patronage. The line also functions internationally: it signals to other postcolonial audiences that Iran’s revolution is not just domestic regime change but a front in a wider anti-imperial struggle.

The brilliance, and the danger, is how efficiently it converts historical grievance into permanent moral drama. Once politics is staged as exorcism, every dispute becomes existential.