Former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif:

We have a problem. We have always been living in the past.

Either we are boasting about the glories of our past, or we are constantly repeating its failures to one another.

The result is that we have become prisoners of the past. We cannot break away from it and move toward the future.

And until we break away from the past, we will not be able to achieve the things we are talking about, like becoming an economy comparable to Spain.