Top 115 Quotes & Sayings by Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Page 2

I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate.

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.

No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that's what the West is all about.

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.

I don't believe there is such a thing as 'moderate Islam.' I think it's better to talk about degrees of belief and degrees of practice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't believe in hell and heaven anymore. Or angels. I think Islam is a superstition like every other superstition. But now because it's a superstition, unlike Christianity, that hasn't been tested and hasn't gone through a process of enlightenment, I think it's a dangerous superstition.

However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

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.

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.

...Bear true witness, even if it be against yourselves, your parents or your family.

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.

Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

I want people to emphasize life before death as opposed to life after death.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As soon as something like Monty Python's 'The Life of Brian' appears with a Muhammad figure as the main lead, directed by an Arabic Theo van Gogh, the controversial late Dutch filmmaker, we will have taken an enormous step forward.

It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn't have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.

But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.

Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.

...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.

The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.

Most unmarried Somali girls who got pregnant committed suicide. I knew of one girl in Mogadishu who poured a can of gasoline over herself in the living room, with everyone there, and burned herself alive. Of course, if she hadn't done this, her father and brothers would probably have killed her anyway.

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.

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?

I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.

I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that Islam is peace and tolerance.

We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn't cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn't cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war.

There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against the staff of Charlie Hebdo. It is the obligation of the Western media and Western leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom of expression, whether in satire on any other form. The West must not appease, it must not be silenced. We must send a united message to the terrorists: Your violence cannot destroy our soul.

There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance

We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.

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.

The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.

It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.

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.

I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.

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.

I love life more than I love death.

Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.

Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Infuriatingly stupid analysts - especially people who called themselves Arabists, yet who seemed to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world - wrote reams of commentary [after 9/11]. Their articles were all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero, which medieval Muslim scholars had done more than eight hundred years ago; about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance, not the slightest bit violent. These were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew.

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.

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.

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.

By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mindset of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.

This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman. This was not an 'un-Islamic' attack by a bunch of thugs - the perpetrators could be heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. Nor was it spontaneous. It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow terror, and in that it has worked.