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Ayaan Hirsi Ali quotes - page 3
Today you have this horrible alliance between the far left and the Islamists and they're using the modern media tool to shut people like me out by smearing us.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I cannot think of a system of law that dehumanizes & degrades women more than Islamic Law.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Beware of zealots of any flavor. Beware of proselytizers of religious utopias. And beware of professors who confuse teaching students how to think with teaching them what to think.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
A mosque is an island of gender apartheid.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Contempt for women is inscribed in the works of Saint Paul.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
That is my dream. But frankly, I do not know if Western feminists have the courage or clarity of vision to help me realize it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Numbers were a mystery to me. I was so far behind. It was only in Nairobi, at age ten, that I figured out anything at all about the way time is calculated: minutes, hours, years. In Saudi Arabia the calendar had been Islamic, based on lunar months; Ethiopia maintained an ancient solar calendar. The year was written 1399 in Saudi Arabia, 1972 in Ethiopia, and 1980 in Kenya and everywhere else. In Ethiopia we even had a different clock: sunrise was called one o'clock and noon was called six. (Even within Kenya, people used two systems for telling time, the British and the Swahili.) The months, the days--everything was conceived differently. Only in Juja Road Primary school did I begin to figure out what people meant when they referred to precise dates and times. Grandma never learned to tell time at all. All her life, noon was when shadows were short, and your age was measured by rainy seasons. She got by perfectly well with her system.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
My mother saw herself as a victim. Once upon a time she had shaped her future and made decisions -- she had left Somalia for Aden, divorced her first husband and chosen my father--but at some point, it seemed, she lost hope. Many Somali women in her position would have worked, would have taken control of their lives, but my mother, having absorbed the Arab attitude that pious women should not work outside the home, felt that this would not be proper. It never occurred to her to go out and create a new life for herself, although she can't have been older than thirty-five or forty when my father left. Instead, she remained completely dependent. She nursed grievances; she was resentful; she was often violent; and she was always depressed.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The liberation of women is like a vast, unfinished house. The west wing is fairly complete.... Go to the east wing, however, and what you find is worse than unfinished.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
But the more pressing business is what feminists can do to prevent an alien culture of oppression from taking root in the West.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
So this, in a nutshell, was my Enlightenment: free inquiry, universal education, individual freedom, the outlawing of private violence, and the protection of individual property rights.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
If there is an infallible mark of an advanced civilization it is surely the marginalization and criminalization of violence.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In the madrassa, questions were not welcome; they were considered impertinent.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The fundamentalists seem haunted by the human body and neurotically debate which fractions of it should be covered, until they declare the whole thing, from head to toe, a gigantic private part.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In a clan society, every kind of human relationship turns on your honor within the clan; outside it, there is nothing-you are excluded from any kind of meaningful existence.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
If your goal is to seek the truth, which education is supposed to do, then we cannot deny that a strict interpretation of Islam is preparation for bigotry, violence, and oppression.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
People often ask me what it's like to live with bodyguards. The short answer is that it's better than being dead.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I too was ill prepared for the West. The only difference between my relatives and me is that I opened my mind.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
We make our sons. This is the tragedy of the tribal Muslim man, and especially the firstborn son: the overblown expectations, the ruinous vanity, the unstable sense of self that relies on the oppression of one group of people-women-to maintain the other group's self-image.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of Western life.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture's intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women's rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
[In Ethiopia, ] Abeh enrolled all three of us in school, which was taught in Amharic. We spoke only Somali and Arabic, so everything was completely foreign again for a little while. It wasn't until I could communicate that I came to a startling realization: the little girls in school with me were not Muslims. They said they were Kiristaan, Christian, which in Saudi Arabia had been a hideous playground insult, meaning impure. I went bewildered to my mother, who confirmed it. Ethiopians were kufr, the very sound of the word was scornful. They drank alcohol and they didn't wash properly. They were despicable.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Photo:
Gage Skidmore
,
CC BY-SA 3.0
Occupation:
Dutch-American Politician
Born:
November 13, 1969
Quotes count:
143
Wikipedia:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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