Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
-
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance
→ -
There are some mosques with facilities for women; it's usually a back room with a back-door entrance.
→ -
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.
→ -
...Bin Laden's quotes from the Quaran resonated in my brain: "When you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck." "If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place." "Wherever you find the polytheists, kill them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them." "You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as friends; they are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them.
→ -
Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.
→ -
Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.
→ -
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.
→ -
I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate.
→ -
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?
→ -
What matters is abuse, and how it is anchored in a religion that denies women their rights as humans. What matters is that atrocities against women and children are carried out in Europe. What matters is that governments and societies must stop hiding behind a hollow pretense of tolerance so that they can recognize and deal with the problem.
→ -
I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of western life. It is in the family that children are groomed to practise, promote and pass on the norms of their parents' culture.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Liberal capitalism is not perfect, but compared to the other 'isms,' it's far superior.
→ -
I love life more than I love death.
→ -
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.
→ -
The mistake that the Bush administration should admit to is not so much that they made the wrong choices. They made the right analysis; they made the right choices. But what they did wrong was the execution of those choices. That was wrong.
→ -
It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Avoiding offense means that we don't accept each other as equals.
→ -
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.
→ -
It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.
→ -
I want people to emphasize life before death as opposed to life after death.
→ -
However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
→ -
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.
→ -
Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Flemming Rose Journalist -
Salman Rushdie Novelist -
Pim Fortuyn Dutch Politician -
Pamela Geller Blogger -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
Maajid Nawaz Political activist -
Nonie Darwish Critic -
Irshad Manji Author -
Ibn Warraq Author -
Jan Peter Balkenende Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands -
Reza Aslan Writer -
Niall Ferguson Historian -
Asra Nomani Journalist -
Sam Harris Author -
Robert Spencer Author -
Wafa Sultan Psychiatrist -
Geert Wilders Dutch Politician -
Christopher Hitchens Author -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Brigitte Gabriel Journalist