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

I love life more than I love death.

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?

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.

What I find daunting always is to stand on a stage and talk to people, whether they agree with me or not.

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.

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.

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

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

Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

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.

Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

The U.S. – the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that’s hardly even a joke.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.

We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.

People feel that they’re being required to meet all sorts of regulations and rules and requirements in their areas of work and MPs are not imposing those sort of restrictions on themselves.

Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.