Top 100 Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
#1. They decided to let immigrants in and I am an immigrant. They gave us a chance to participate in this country's life and I took it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#2. 1. Have faith in the one God, Allah, and Muhammad, His Prophet; 2. Pray five times a day; 3. Fast during the day for the entire ninth month of Ramadan; 4. Provide charity; 5. Make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if possible.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#3. If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status, we could do it as well.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#4. I assume the closest members of my family don't actually want to kill me, but the truth is that I have shamed and hurt them; they have to deal with the outrage that my public statements cause, and undoubtedly some members of my clan do want to kill me for that.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#5. You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [ ... ] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#6. The demand that Islam makes of women is to not attract attention to yourself, and if you are in a secular society, that attire does exactly that, and it is a political symbol, no longer religious.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#7. You who call yourselves liberals must understand that it is your way of life that is under threat. Withdraw my right to speak freely, and you jeopardize your own in the future. Ally yourselves with the Islamists at your peril. Tolerate their intolerance at your peril.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#8. This move is called Qworegoys,
and the women of my grandmother's family taught it to their daughters just as they taught them to make thorn-bush fences to protect the hut from hyenas.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#9. You could see her face, because she was Somali. Saudi women had no faces.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#10. Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved, just as the Prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#11. The problem is that those of us who were born into Islam and who don't want to live according to scripture - we don't have what the Jews have, which is a rabbinical tradition that allows you to ask questions. We also don't have the church tradition that the Christians have.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#12. In 2010, I suggested that if you are a good Muslim with a good conscience, go and look for a better God, and I think that was juvenile of me.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#13. European children are educated in a narrative of human tolerance every day, and if you want to be sure to prevent a backlash, you should at least think of bringing Muslim children and teenagers into the fold of that narrative of tolerance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#14. ...the right to think, to speak, and to write in freedom and without fear is ultimately a more sacred thing than any religion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#15. Multiculturalism helps immigrants postpone the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and inappropriate. It locks people into corrupt, inefficient, and unjust social systems, even if it does preserve their arts and crafts. It perpetuates poverty, misery, and abuse.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#16. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists. Equating all Muslims with terrorism is stupid and wrong. But acknowledging that there is a link between Islam and terror is appropriate and necessary.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#17. Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#18. Avoiding offense means that we don't accept each other as equals.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#19. Such is the tragedy of girls and women who by the strictures of their upbringing and culture cannot own up to their body's desires, even to themselves.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#20. I grew up in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia, and in Kenya. I came to Europe in 1992, when I was 22, and became a member of Parliament in Holland.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#21. My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#22. But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#23. I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#24. There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#25. I'd love to go and visit the Mosque in Mecca again, just for the sheer beauty of it, not for God - much the way a non-Catholic might go to Vatican City because of the beauty of the buildings and the artifacts.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#26. In 1985 as a teenager in Kenya, I was an adamant member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#27. Adults never explained anything. They saw children as akin to small animals, creatures who had to be tugged and beaten into adulthood before they were worthy of information and discussion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#28. We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#29. American liberals today are hesitant to speak out against the denial of rights that is perpetrated in the name of Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#31. Catholics should be proselytizing about a God who is love, who represents a hereafter where there's no hell, who wants you to lead a life where you can confess your sins and feel much better afterwards. Those are lovely concepts of God.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#32. The "kufar," or unbelievers. She had begun her journey to
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#33. Contrast this with the use by modern Islamic scholars of Muhammad's decision to marry a six-year-old girl, consummating their marriage when she turned nine, to justify child marriage in Iraq and Yemen today.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#34. A virgin's silence is the proper answer to a marriage proposal; it signifies a dignified consent.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#35. We who don't want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#36. If we don't take effective measures now, the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#37. Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#38. Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#39. When I look at people talking about intersectionality, what I see is the human being magnifying a biological attribute, and then putting them aside, putting them in a corner as victims of oppression....I most certainly don't see myself as a victim.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#40. we need to stand up for our own principles as liberals. Specifically, we need to say to offended Western Muslims (and their liberal supporters) that it is not we who must accommodate their beliefs and sensitivities. Rather, it is they who must learn to live with our commitment to free speech.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#41. In April 2006, a Dutch court ordered that I leave my safe-home that I was renting from the State. The judge concluded that my neighbors had a right to argue that they felt unsafe because of my presence in the building.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#42. When I was with the Labor Party, I'd get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn't conducive to their policies or to electoral success.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#43. It's wrong to treat Muslims as if they will never find their John Stuart Mill. Christianity and Judaism show people can be very dogmatic and then open up.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#44. I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#45. Most of all, I think it was the novels that saved me from submission. I was young, but the first tiny, meek beginnings of my rebellion had already clicked into place.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#46. As a woman you are better off in life earning your own money. You couldn't prevent your husband from leaving you or taking another wife, but you could have some of your dignity if you didn't have to beg him for financial support.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#47. Liberal capitalism is not perfect, but compared to the other 'isms,' it's far superior.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#48. I am not against migration. It is simply pragmatic to restrict migration, while at the same time encouraging integration and fighting discrimination. I support the idea of the free movement of goods, people, money and jobs in Europe.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#49. I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#50. In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious ... The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#51. Finally Abdellahi Moussa Boqor asked, "So why are you doing this?" I paused for a moment, and then the words just came out of my mouth. "It is the will of the soul," I said. "The soul cannot be coerced.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#52. I lived in countries that had no democracy ... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#53. The key imperatives of modernity: freedom of conscience, tolerance of difference, equality of the sexes, and an investment in life before death.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#54. I talk about a Christianity that is enlightened enough to separate spirituality from the rest of life. Not just church and state, but knowledge and church.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#56. In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#57. Americans have always welcomed people of all backgrounds, religions, and races. It's a spirit of tolerance, now energized and amplified by the cult of multiculturalism.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#58. Paradoxically, Islam is the most decentralized and yet, at the same time, the most rigid religion in the world. Everyone feels entitled to rule out free discussion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#59. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my mother's angels and djinns.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#60. I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#61. Confronted with such flagrant acts of intolerance - such abuses of the freedom of speech - a free society must surely do more. For intolerance is the one thing a free society cannot afford to tolerate.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#62. It's not enough to say it's shocking, it's appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#63. Mahad had done wrong, but I had been unforgivably trusting, which meant I was fatally dense. I had failed to be suspicious. I deserved my grandma's scorn. I was not allowed to talk back to Grandma, and Ma said nothing to defend me. I could only sob, and seethe.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#64. A key problem for Islam today can be summarized in three simplifying sentences: Christians worship a man made divine. Jews worship a book. And Muslims worship both.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#65. Many people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#66. When your life is threatened, whether it's by human beings or by disease or whatever, you come to appreciate life.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#68. No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that's what the West is all about.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#69. I don't have much in me left for Somalia, because the country is so broken, it's not realistic to daydream about it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#70. After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#71. This wasn't just a band of frustrated Egyptian architects in Hamburg. It was much bigger than that,. and had nothing to do with frustration. It was about belief.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#72. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#73. The concept of God in Jewish orthodoxy is one where you're having constant quarrels with God. Where I come from, in Islam, the only concept of God is you submit to Him and you obey His commands; no quarreling allowed.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#74. Islam is not a race ... Islam is simply a set of beliefs, and it is not 'Islamophobic' to say Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#75. I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant 'while under their noses women are living like slaves.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#76. If this incomplete ayaan hirsi wants fame sooo much then she shouldn't use religion as a base to be known. Some people justify their in justifications by selling their souls to the devil, ayaan I'm sure u have taken the time to read the bible. Do tell me it's stance on woman comparing to men ...
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#77. Women covering their heads is traditional, but now we're seeing more and more women covering themselves from head to toe. This is said to be for religious reasons but it's actually the conflation of religion and politics - every political movement has its slogans, flags and dress.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#78. It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#79. I'd like Muslims to look at their religion as a set of beliefs that they can appraise critically and pick and choose from.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#80. Christians - at least Christians in a liberal democracy - have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#81. In Holland I have seen well-meaning, principled people blinded by multiculturalism, overwhelmed by the imperative to be sensitive and respectful of immigrant culture, while ignoring criminal abuse of women and girls.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#82. What we are now doing with the victory, and I agree with you if you condemn that and I condemn whole-heartedly the trivial bullshit it is to go after a man who makes a scientific breakthrough and all that we as women - organized women - do is to fret about his shirt?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#83. The exercise of my reason itself was forbidden. But the questions never stopped coming, eventually leading to this one: "Why would a benevolent God set up the world like this, marking one half of the population to be second-class citizens? Or was it just men who did this?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#84. Excision of my genitals didn't eliminate the human sex drive, and neither did the fear of hellfire. Repression only led to hypocrisy and lying, strategies that corrupt the human individual, and it failed to protect people from unwanted pregnancy and disease. The
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#86. I think of Canada, first and foremost, in terms of space. The amount of space available is breathtaking.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#87. My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#88. All scriptures contain contradictions and the Qur'an is no exception.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#89. Every Islamic value I had been taught instructed me to put myself last. Life on earth is a test, and if you manage to put yourself last in this life, you are serving Allah; your place will be first in the Hereafter. The more deeply you submit your will, the more virtuous that makes you.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#90. Islamic scholars developed a doctrine known as "abrogation" (an-Nasikh wa'l Mansukh), whereby Allah issues new revelations that supersede old ones.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#93. It even contains rules on what types of blows are permissible when a husband beats his wife.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#94. There's peacetime and there's wartime, and you don't need polarization on wartime issues. You need polarization on all other issues.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#95. Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#96. I accept that there are multitudes seeking God, seeking meaning, and so on, but if they reject atheism, I would rather they became modern-day Catholics or Jews than that they became Muslims.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#97. Muslim leaders should ask themselves what exactly their relationship is to a political movement that encourages young men to kill and maim on religious grounds.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#98. Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#99. I come from a world where the word 'trauma' doesn't exist, because we are too poor. I didn't have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn't all that bad.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#100. Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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