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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
105 quotes
“There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]ith like-minded people one cannot discuss. With like-minded people one can only participate in a church service, and, as is widely known, I do not like church services.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: NOS Journaal, official Dutch newsrail, 8 pm, August 30, 2006. "Met gelijkgezinden kun je alleen maar een kerkdienst* houden, en zoals bekend, houd ik niet van kerkdiensten." "Kerkdienst" means church service of a Christ…
“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 (born 1969) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hirsi Ali: "Never confuse Islamic Sharia and the Muslims who really mean it with those extremist Christians who live in the United States", Jihad Watch, July 13, 2007
“Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech on Freedom of Expression at the European Parliament (February 14, 2008)
“Islam is not a religion of peace. It's a political theory of conquest that seeks domination by any means it can.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Author, activist condemns Muslim faith at Palm Beach talk", Palm Beach Daily News (March 21, 2009)
“Every accommodation of Muslim demands leads to a sense of euphoria and a conviction that Allah is on their side. They see every act of appeasement as an invitation to make fresh demands.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Author, activist condemns Muslim faith at Palm Beach talk", Palm Beach Daily News (March 21, 2009)
“The most pressing question of our time is this: Is European society to be taken over by a radical invasion of Muslim immigrants?”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Author, activist condemns Muslim faith at Palm Beach talk", Palm Beach Daily News (March 21, 2009)
“In countries such as Pakistan and Iran, and to a lesser extent in parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Tanzania, after the introduction of Islam, a significant regression occurred in individual freedom, the acquisition of scientific knowledge, and the rights of women.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps the writer who has best identified the problems within the Muslim world is the philosopher Ibn Warraq, of Pakistani origin, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim. That this courageous man writes under a pseudonym shows that even in the West he does not feel safe.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do. The answer is no: I would like to keep living. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This was Saudi Arabia, where Islam originated, governed strictly according to the scriptures and example of the Prophet Muhammad. And by law, all women in Saudi Arabia must be in the care of a man. My mother argued loudly with the Saudi immigration official, but he merely repeated in an ever louder voice that she could not leave the airport without a man in charge.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With our grandmother staying behind in Somalia, my mother had nobody with whom to share tasks and plans. She could do nothing on her own. She wasn't supposed to go out on the street without these new guardians of ours, our uncles, and neither were we. To phone them she had to scuttle down to the corner grocer, with my ten-year-old brother in tow acting as her protective male.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We had already learned part of the Quran by heart in Mogadishu, although of course we had never understood more than a word or two of it, because it was in Arabic. But the teacher in Mecca said we recited it disrespectfully: we raced it, to show off. So now we had to learn it all by heart again, but this time with reverent pauses. We still didn't understand more than the bare gist of it. Apparently, understanding wasn't the point.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women like this never pressed charges. The prospect of making their way alone seemed to them impossible. They were convinced that by accepting systematic, really merciless abuse, they were serving Allah and earning a place in Heaven. They always went back to their husband.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 the bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In October 2002, I flew to California. It was the first time I had ever been in the United States, and I realized almost immediately that my preconceptions of America were completely ludicrous. I was expecting rednecks and fat people, with lots of guns, very aggressive police, and overt racism – a caricature of a caricature. In reality, of course, I saw people living perfectly well-ordered lives, jogging and drinking coffee.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course, I also encountered hostile reactions in campaigning. People called me names, even spat at me; I received more threats. The most remarkable people, to me, were those who apparently approved of everything I said but nonetheless wouldn't dream of voting for the Liberal Party. It reminded me of Somalia: they wouldn't vote outside their clan.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cannot think of a system of law that dehumanizes & degrades women more than Islamic Law.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 7 News Sydney, (April 4, 2017)
“Today you have this horrible alliance between the far left and the Islamists and they’re using the modern media tool to shut people like me out by smearing us.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in “Ayaan Hirsi Ali slams protesters who prevented her visit to Australia,” Emily Ritchie, The Australian, (April 5, 2017)
“The Prophet said, “I looked at Paradise and found poor people forming the majority of its inhabitants; and I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I learned Dutch I began to formulate an almost impossibly ambitious goal: I would study political science to find out why this society, although it appeared to me to be godless, worked when every society I had lived in, no matter how Muslim it claimed to be, was rotten with corruption, violence, and self-centered guile.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of Western life.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The West tends to respond to the social failures of Muslim immigrants with what can be called the racism of low expectations. This Western attitude is based on the idea that people of color must be exempted from “normal” standards of behavior. A well-meaning class of people holds that minorities should not share all of the obligations that the majority must meet.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The message of Nomad is clear and can be stated at the outset: The West urgently needs to compete with the jihadis, the proponents of a holy war, for the hearts and minds of its own Muslim immigrant populations. It needs to provide education directed at breaking the spell of the infallible Prophet, to protect women from the oppressive dictates of the Quran, and to promote alternative sources of spirituality.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I thought, I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny. He is arbitrary and incoherent. Faith in him demands that I relinquish my responsibility, become a member of a herd. He denies me pleasure, the adventure of learning, friendships. I am feeble in faith, mother, because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman—because I don’t want to be like you.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We make our sons. This is the tragedy of the tribal Muslim man, and especially the firstborn son: the overblown expectations, the ruinous vanity, the unstable sense of self that relies on the oppression of one group of people—women—to maintain the other group’s self-image.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is not about projecting onto others your inability to cope, nurturing hatred and then going off either to self-destruction or to annihilate those who have been more successful than you.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet both the immigrants from the tribe and bloodline and the activists of prosperity share a common delusion: they believe that it is possible to make this transition without paying the price of choosing between value. One side wants change in their circumstances without letting go of tradition; the other, overcome with guilt and pity, wants to help newcomers with material change but cannot bring themselves to demand that they excise traditional, outdated values from their outlook.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I too was ill prepared for the West. The only difference between my relatives and me is that I opened my mind.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a tribe we are fragmented; as clans, scattered; as families, dysfunctional.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People often ask me what it’s like to live with bodyguards. The short answer is that it’s better than being dead.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a way these threats motivate me. They have given my voice more legitimacy.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Certainly much nonsense passes for culture in the United States, including an obsession with celebrities of all kinds. But that is scarcely representative of the vast wealth of extraordinary art, literature, and music produced by Americans in the almost two and a half centuries of the country’s existence.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most American audiences reacted, first, with astonishment, and second with compassion to stories of the routine horrors of a Muslim woman’s life, even as they struggled to believe it was happening in their own country. There was one exception to this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The argument that by criticizing Islam you defame believing Muslims is specious. If I criticize George Washington, I am not defaming Americans; if I deplore Abraham’s lying to Pharaoh about his wife being his sister I am not slandering other Jews—or, for that matter, Muslims, who also recognize Abraham as a Patriarch. But a religion, Islam, based on a book, the Quran, that denies women basic human rights is backward, and to say so is not an insult but an opinion.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On campus after campus I would stare in despair at these confident young men and women, born in the United States, who had so manifestly benefited from every advantage of Western education yet were determined to ignore the profound differences between a theocratic mind-set and a democratic mind-set.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are activist groups of every stripe on campus, yet nothing for girls fleeing Islam, no group fighting for the rights of Muslim women. When violence is committed in the name of Islam these student activists are silent.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If your goal is to seek the truth, which education is supposed to do, then we cannot deny that a strict interpretation of Islam is preparation for bigotry, violence, and oppression.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Amira and Muna, like so many Muslim girls, were seen by their families as little more than incubators for sons.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a clan society, every kind of human relationship turns on your honor within the clan; outside it, there is nothing—you are excluded from any kind of meaningful existence.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Controlling women’s sexuality and limiting men’s access to sex with women are the central focus of the code of honor and shame. Muslim women are chattel, and every Muslim girl must be a virgin at marriage.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fundamentalists seem haunted by the human body and neurotically debate which fractions of it should be covered, until they declare the whole thing, from head to toe, a gigantic private part.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even today virginity is the linchpin of a Muslim girl’s education. Growing up, I was taught that it is more important to remain a virgin than it is to stay alive, better to die than be raped. Sex before marriage is an unthinkable crime. Every Muslim girl knows that here value relies almost wholly on her hymen, the most essential part of her body, far more important than her brain or limbs.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To claim that the oppression of women has nothing to do with Islam and is “only” a traditional custom is intellectually dishonest, a decoy. The two elements are interwoven. The code of honor and shame may be tribal and pre-Islamic in its origins, but it is now an integral part of the Islamic religion and culture. Honor killing asserts what Islam also asserts: that women are subordinate to men and must remain their sexual property.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the text of the Quran and in Shari’a law, men and women are self-evidently not equal. Muslim women are considered physically, emotionally, intellectually, and morally inferior to men, and they have fewer legal rights.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the madrassa, questions were not welcome; they were considered impertinent.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is an infallible mark of an advanced civilization it is surely the marginalization and criminalization of violence.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source