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.
AYAAN HIRSI ALIIf such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status, we could do it as well.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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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.
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I love life more than I love death.
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There are some mosques with facilities for women; it’s usually a back room with a back-door entrance.
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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?
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My conscience is informed by reason. It’s like Kant’s categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
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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.
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I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
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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.
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Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
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The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.
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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.
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Bear true witness, even if it be against yourselves, your parents or your family.
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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.
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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.
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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.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI