“Liberal capitalism is not perfect, but compared to the other ‘isms,’ it’s far superior.”

I would rather clean than beg.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

My conscience is informed by reason. It’s like Kant’s categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

If we don’t take effective measures now, the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights.

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.

Muslim leaders should ask themselves what exactly their relationship is to a political movement that encourages young men to kill and main on religious grounds.

All my life I have been a nomad.

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.

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.

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

I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism.

Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.

All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.

The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.

I don’t think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It’s the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.

Capitalism is a stupid system, a backward system.

I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.