Mohammad Javad Zarif

Even for defeating extremists, you need more than a military strategy.

I'm not that worried about war. Insecurity is the word I would use - insecurity and tension and conflict. I thought civilized people had abandoned wars. Sometimes people don't make rational decisions.

If you look at the developments in the international scene over the past many years, we haven't been able to resolve many problems and many crises, because we have approached them from a zero-sum perspective. My gain has always been defined as somebody else's loss, and through that, we never resolve problems.

If we can ascertain and show to our people that the West is ready to deal with Iran on the basis of mutual respect and mutual interests and equal footing, then it will have an impact on almost every aspect of Iran's foreign policy behavior - and some aspects of Iran's domestic policy.

Iran is not about building nuclear weapons. We don't wanna build nuclear weapons. We don't believe that nuclear weapons bring security to anybody, certainly not to us.

I have lost every respect for U.S. justice. The judgment by the Supreme Court and the other, even more absurd judgment by a New York circuit court deciding that Iran should pay damages for 9/11 are the height of absurdity.

In order to practice dialogue, you need to be able to set aside your assumptions and try to listen more than you want to talk. It's not always politically correct to be able to do that, but it can give you a better sense of the reality.

That's what I do not believe - that dividing Iran into 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable' forces is either correct, conducive, or anybody's business. When the United States exercised that practice in the past, it didn't produce results.

I lived for 30 years in the U.S., but always kept my Islamic and Iranian culture and customs... even now, western lifestyle feels strange to me.

That's the problem with the United States. It believes it can control everybody's behavior.

Iran is not in any sort of routine groupings. It's not an Arab country. It's not part of the Indian subcontinent. So it's in a neighborhood where it has some unique characteristics. We are a country which embraced Islam, learned Arabic, but didn't change its language or its culture... That's what keeps us unique.

Iran is not interested in a war. Iran is capable of defending itself and teaching a very harsh lesson to anybody who commits aggression against Iran, but we're not interested.