Quote

I call myself a liberal - a classical liberal as in John Stuart Mill.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: November 13
Activist
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Politician
Scientist
Screenwriter
Xamar
Mills
Classical
Liberal
John
Call
Stuart
Mill

More quotes by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Image
What I find daunting always is to stand on a stage and talk to people, whether they agree with me or not.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
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
Image
Americans have always welcomed people of all backgrounds, religions, and races. It's a spirit of tolerance, now energized and amplified by the cult of multiculturalism.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
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
Image
The people who believe themselves to be on the left, and who defend the agents of Islam in the name of tolerance and culture, are being rightwing. Not just rightwing. Extreme rightwing. I don't understand how you can be so upset about the Christian right and just ignore the Islamic right. I'm talking about equality.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
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.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
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
Image
Many people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
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
Image
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.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
In 1985 as a teenager in Kenya, I was an adamant member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant 'while under their noses women are living like slaves.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Image
But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali