“I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.”

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’d like Muslims to look at their religion as a set of beliefs that they can appraise critically and pick and choose from.

I don’t have much in me left for Somalia, because the country is so broken, it’s not realistic to daydream about it.

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.

I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.

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

The idea that if people are just friendly and demonstrate they want peace, that will be answered with good will – that is really naive.

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.

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

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.

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

There are some mosques with facilities for women; it’s usually a back room with a back-door entrance.

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.

Then, believe it or not, along came the wave of the English cats like John Mayall, Eric Clapton and the Stones embracing the great American art form – the blues.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers’ growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement – and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

Emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the “country” mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.

Anyone who doesn’t speak English isn’t worth speaking to

I love Evensong. There’s something sad and essentially English about it.

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.