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.
AYAAN HIRSI ALIMy first experience in the Netherlands was very pleasant, extremely pleasant. I mean, I got my residence permit, refugee status, within four weeks of arrival. People treated me extremely well.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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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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But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can’t acquire knowledge.
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Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.
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Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.
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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 mistake that the Bush administration should admit to is not so much that they made the wrong choices. They made the right analysis; they made the right choices. But what they did wrong was the execution of those choices. That was wrong.
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I love life more than I love death.
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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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I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that Islam is peace and tolerance.
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Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
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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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It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.
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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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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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What I find daunting always is to stand on a stage and talk to people, whether they agree with me or not.
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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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I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate.
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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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No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that’s what the West is all about.
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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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Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.
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The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.
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I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘moderate Islam.’ I think it’s better to talk about degrees of belief and degrees of practice.
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In Holland I have seen well-meaning, principled people blinded by multiculturalism, overwhelmed by the imperative to be sensitive and respectful of immigrant culture, while ignoring criminal abuse of women and girls.
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I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI