TEHRAN -- President Masoud Pezeshkian said Thursday Iran has repeatedly announced that it seeks dialogue but will not hold negotiations “at any cost”.
“It is not acceptable to impose sanctions and say that you should have no missiles or weapons, and then talk about negotiations again,” he said in a meeting with the intellectuals of Tehran province.
Negotiations must be conducted with dignity, Pezeshkian said, reiterating that Iran will never accept bullying and will make concessions for the sake of talks.
“If they come with dignity, we will negotiate, but we will not yield to coercion ... from the beginning, we have declared that we seek dialogue and negotiation, but not at any cost,” he said.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who walked out of a multiparty and UN-endorsed nuclear agreement between Iran and others in 2018, restored his “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran earlier this month, while saying he was open to a deal with Iran.
Pezeshkian said Trump “thinks that if he comes and threatens us, we will back down tomorrow and say, ‘Alright, we accept whatever you say.’ 
“We are human beings with dignity. If they come with dignity, we will have a dialogue, but we are not going to yield to coercion,” Pezeshkian said.
On February 7, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said experience has shown that negotiations with the U.S. have no effect on solving Iran’s problems.
“Some people pretend that if we sit at the negotiating table, some problem will be solved, but the fact that we must understand correctly is that negotiating with the U.S. has no effect on solving the country’s problems,” the Leader stated.
Pezeshkian called on the Iranian nation to stay put in the face of the enemies’ economic sanctions and threats of military aggression.
“We should not be afraid of sanctions and threats. Let’s assume Iran is the only country 

in the world and there are no other countries. Can’t we stand on our own two feet?
“We must do something to make it work. If the world threatens us, we should not be terrified and should rather become more resilient,” he said.
Pezeshkian said the way to deal with problems is to use the capacity of the country’s elite, teachers, and producers.
“If we value those who strive for the progress of the country, we can robustly build Iran,” he added.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Pezeshkian pointed to Israeli crimes in Gaza and Lebanon and said, “No awakened conscience will accept the moves taken by the criminal Israel against the defenseless people in Gaza, Lebanon, and Palestine.”
He added that the United States and Europe not only supported the Israeli regime’s “brutality” but gave bombs and weapons to it.
“If one billion Muslims in the region were united as brothers, the genocidal Zionist regime, with a population of two million, would not be able to create such a situation for Muslims,” the president said.
He slammed plots to provoke ethnic and religious division among the regional nations and said no country holds the child-killing Israeli regime accountable for its crimes due to U.S.