70+ Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes On Education, Religion And Marriage

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Dutch politician and writer of Somali origin. She is a prominent critic of Islam and advocate for the rights of women in Islamic societies. She is a former member of the Dutch Parliament, and currently serves as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on education, religion, marriage.

Top 10 Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes

1. If we don't take effective measures now, the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights.
2. 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.
3. There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance
4. Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
5. The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.
6. I love life more than I love death.
7. 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.
8. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that Islam is peace and tolerance.
9. 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.
10. My 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.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Image Quotes

I love life more than I love death. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Short Quotes

• Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.
• I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.
• We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.
• Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
• The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.
• It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.
• I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.
• Avoiding offense means that we don't accept each other as equals.
• Every time I went on TV I got a threat.
• ...Bear true witness, even if it be against yourselves, your parents or your family.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes About Religion

Let us recognize that we can no longer tolerate violent oppression of women in the name of religion and culture any more than we would tolerate violent oppression espoused by any other bully in the name of a twisted rationale. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my mother's angels and djinns. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Women covering their heads is traditional, but now we're seeing more and more women covering themselves from head to toe. This is said to be for religious reasons but it's actually the conflation of religion and politics - every political movement has its slogans, flags and dress. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes About Life

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I come from a world where the word 'trauma' doesn't exist, because we are too poor. I didn't have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn't all that bad. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

When a 'Life of Brian' comes out with Muhammad in the lead role, directed by an Arab equivalent of Theo van Gogh, it will be a huge step forward. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I want people to emphasize life before death as opposed to life after death. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes About Rights

Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Famous Quotes And Sayings

I love life more than I love death. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn't translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

What matters is abuse, and how it is anchored in a religion that denies women their rights as humans. What matters is that atrocities against women and children are carried out in Europe. What matters is that governments and societies must stop hiding behind a hollow pretense of tolerance so that they can recognize and deal with the problem. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Most unmarried Somali girls who got pregnant committed suicide. I knew of one girl in Mogadishu who poured a can of gasoline over herself in the living room, with everyone there, and burned herself alive. Of course, if she hadn't done this, her father and brothers would probably have killed her anyway. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn't cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn't cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

My brother thinks it is very, very bad that I left Islam. My half-sister wants to convert me back; I want to convert her to Western values. My mum is terrified that when I die, and we all go to God, I will be burned. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I don't believe in hell and heaven anymore. Or angels. I think Islam is a superstition like every other superstition. But now because it's a superstition, unlike Christianity, that hasn't been tested and hasn't gone through a process of enlightenment, I think it's a dangerous superstition. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn't have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Of 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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant 'while under their noses women are living like slaves. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status, we could do it as well. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Muslim leaders should ask themselves what exactly their relationship is to a political movement that encourages young men to kill and maim on religious grounds. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There is one Islam, unreformed, but three sets of Muslims. Medina, Mecca, and. Dissidents, reformers, whatever you want to call them. The first group are the extremists and fundamentalists, the second the great mass of Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace, and the third are reformers. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman. This was not an 'un-Islamic' attack by a bunch of thugs - the perpetrators could be heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. Nor was it spontaneous. It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow terror, and in that it has worked. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against the staff of Charlie Hebdo. It is the obligation of the Western media and Western leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom of expression, whether in satire on any other form. The West must not appease, it must not be silenced. We must send a united message to the terrorists: Your violence cannot destroy our soul. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I would rather clean than beg. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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? — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Life Lessons by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

1. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Dutch politician who has dedicated her life to advocating for the rights of women and minorities, and her work serves as an example of the power of standing up for what you believe in.
2. She has shown that it is possible to make a difference in the world, even in the face of great adversity, and that it is important to stand up for what you believe in.
3. Her work has also highlighted the importance of understanding and respecting cultural and religious differences in order to create a more tolerant and inclusive society.