It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.
AYAAN HIRSI ALII have had to pay a price for leaving Islam and for speaking out. I have to pay for round-the-clock security because of the death threats against me.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God’s holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.
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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.
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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.
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However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
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Avoiding offense means that we don’t accept each other as equals.
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All my life I have been a nomad.
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I talk about a Christianity that is enlightened enough to separate spirituality from the rest of life. Not just church and state, but knowledge and church.
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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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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.
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My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.
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Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
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I have had to pay a price for leaving Islam and for speaking out. I have to pay for round-the-clock security because of the death threats against me.
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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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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.
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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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I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.
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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 wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that Islam is peace and tolerance.
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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.
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The idea that if people are just friendly and demonstrate they want peace, that will be answered with good will – that is really naive.
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We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.
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I confront the European elite’s self-image as tolerant ‘while under their noses women are living like slaves.
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Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen.
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I’d love to go and visit the Mosque in Mecca again, just for the sheer beauty of it, not for God – much the way a non-Catholic might go to Vatican City because of the beauty of the buildings and the artifacts.
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You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it’s your own child. And that’s what was taken away from me. My father passed away thinking I still had to go back to his way of believing.
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Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI