I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
AYAAN HIRSI ALIOf 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.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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I would rather clean than beg.
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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.
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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.
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But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can’t acquire knowledge.
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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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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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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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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.
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As soon as something like Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’ appears with a Muhammad figure as the main lead, directed by an Arabic Theo van Gogh, the controversial late Dutch filmmaker, we will have taken an enormous step forward.
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It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.
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There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance.
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I don’t have much in me left for Somalia, because the country is so broken, it’s not realistic to daydream about it.
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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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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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Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI