I call myself a liberal – a classical liberal as in John Stuart Mill.
AYAAN HIRSI ALINo one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that’s what the West is all about.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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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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We who don’t want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community.
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If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status, we could do it as well.
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We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.
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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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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.
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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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Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
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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’ll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist, I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.
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Bear true witness, even if it be against yourselves, your parents or your family.
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When I was with the Labor Party, I’d get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn’t conducive to their policies or to electoral success.
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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 want people to emphasize life before death as opposed to life after death.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI