Daily Inspiration Quote by Shirin Ebadi

Ebadi’s line is a prosecutor’s closing argument disguised as a moral principle: she isn’t just condemning violence as ugly, she’s indicting it as ineffective. “Useful and lasting” is the key pairing. Useful speaks the language of outcomes and institutions, not sentiment. Lasting drags the conversation into time: revolutions, crackdowns, “security” campaigns, revenge cycles. Violence might produce quick obedience or theatrical “victory,” but it can’t manufacture legitimacy, trust, or a stable legal order. For a lawyer, that’s the whole case.

The subtext is also strategic. Ebadi is writing from the pressure point where states and dissidents both claim necessity. In Iran’s modern history, the government’s coercion is routinely framed as order, while oppositional violence is framed as resistance; each feeds the other’s narrative. Her sentence refuses to grant either side that alibi. It’s an attempt to shift the battlefield from force to accountability, from martyrdom to procedure.

There’s an implicit critique of macho political storytelling here: the idea that history is moved by the decisive blow. Ebadi counters with a quieter theory of change, one built on courts, documentation, and rights language - tools that don’t deliver catharsis but do create precedents. The rhetoric is spare, almost stubbornly unromantic, because it’s meant to survive interrogation. In a world that treats violence as “realistic,” she insists realism is measured by what endures after the smoke clears.