Top 100 Hirsi Ali Quotes
#1. Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.
Christopher Hitchens
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. My first experience in the Netherlands was very pleasant, extremely pleasant. I mean, I got my residence permit, refugee status, within four weeks of arrival. People treated me extremely well.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#5. The rule of clerics is totalitarian. It means people can't choose. Humanity is varied, and we should celebrate that instead of suppressing it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#6. If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status, we could do it as well.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#7. Let us recognize that we can no longer tolerate violent oppression of women in the name of religion and culture any more than we would tolerate violent oppression espoused by any other bully in the name of a twisted rationale.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. You could see her face, because she was Somali. Saudi women had no faces.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#14. The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised ...
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#15. 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
#16. In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn't translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#17. The idea that if people are just friendly and demonstrate they want peace, that will be answered with good will - that is really naive.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#18. 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
#19. I was learning that in these extremely civilized circles, conflict is dealt with in a very ornate and hypocritical manner.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#20. 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
#21. As a reader, I could put on someone else's shoes and live through his adventures, borrow his individuality and make choices that I didn't have at home.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#22. 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
#23. His name meant "He Who Fasts for a Hundred Days," and in person he more than lived up to his name. He was so thin that he looked like skin stretched over bone. While Sister Aziza wore the hijab, Boqol Sawm wore a Saudi robe, a bit short, so that it showed his bony ankles.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#24. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#25. ...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
#26. 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
#27. In no other modern religion is dissent still a crime, punishable by death.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#28. You obey, and you serve Allah - that is the test. If you submit to God's will on earth, you will attain bliss in the Hereafter. The rule is strict and pure. My doubts severely diminished my chances for eternal bliss, but I found that I couldn't ignore them. I had to resolve this. *
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#29. 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
#30. There is one Islam, unreformed, but three sets of Muslims. Medina, Mecca, and. Dissidents, reformers, whatever you want to call them. The first group are the extremists and fundamentalists, the second the great mass of Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace, and the third are reformers.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#31. 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
#32. A Western woman is not her brother's or her father's property. She's just herself. She can choose her own lifestyle. But in a Muslim family, the honor of the man is between the legs of a woman.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#33. I want people to emphasize life before death as opposed to life after death.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#34. Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#35. People in the West... have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically for fear of being called racist.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#36. Every time you take a train, step into your car, walk into the shopping mall, go to the airport - every single time, something could happen. That's how terrorism works.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#37. Avoiding offense means that we don't accept each other as equals.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#38. 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
#39. I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Even with protection, even with death threats, I can publish, I can travel and I can live the life that I want and not the one my parents want or some imam somewhere thinks I should live.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#43. When I was in Holland, the idea was, all cultures are equal and all are to be preserved. My idea was, no, all humans are equal, but not all cultures are equal.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#44. But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#45. 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
#46. There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#47. 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
#48. In 1985 as a teenager in Kenya, I was an adamant member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#49. We have to start with the little babies who are born now, socialize them in freedom and critical thinking. We don't have to throw away their faith. People confuse the two, thinking if you are enlightened that means apostasy. It doesn't.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#50. 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
#51. We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#52. American liberals today are hesitant to speak out against the denial of rights that is perpetrated in the name of Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#54. Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture's intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women's rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#55. 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
#56. The "kufar," or unbelievers. She had begun her journey to
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#57. You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it's your own child. And that's what was taken away from me. My father passed away thinking I still had to go back to his way of believing.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#58. 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
#59. A virgin's silence is the proper answer to a marriage proposal; it signifies a dignified consent.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#60. 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
#61. My brother thinks it is very, very bad that I left Islam. My half-sister wants to convert me back; I want to convert her to Western values. My mum is terrified that when I die, and we all go to God, I will be burned.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#62. If we don't take effective measures now, the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#63. The liberal psyche wants to protect minorities, to apologize for imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and the appalling treatment of black people during the civil rights movement. At the same time, they want to continue to defend the rights of individuals.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#64. The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#65. Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#66. Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms: Islam is not a religion of peace.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#72. 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
#73. Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#74. I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. I said, Allah wouldn't test us on whether we condemn somebody who became pregnant outside of marriage; He would test us on our hospitality and charity.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#78. Liberal capitalism is not perfect, but compared to the other 'isms,' it's far superior.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#79. There are some mosques with facilities for women; it's usually a back room with a back-door entrance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#80. Until Islam can do what Judaism and Christianity have done - question, critique, interpret, and ultimately modernize its holy scripture - it cannot free Muslims from a host of anachronistic and at times deadly beliefs and practices.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#94. we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. When your life is threatened, whether it's by human beings or by disease or whatever, you come to appreciate life.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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