Top 100 Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes

2. “Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

3. “However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

4. “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

5. “There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

6. “It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

7. “Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

8. “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

10. “The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

11. “I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that Islam is peace and tolerance.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

15. “But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can’t acquire knowledge.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

16. “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

17. “The trap of resentment. It is probably the worst mental prison in the world. It is the inability to let go of anger and the perceived or real injustices we suffer. Some people let one or two, or maybe ten unpleasant experiences poison the rest of their lives. They let their anger ferment and rot their personality. They end up seeing themselves as victims of their parents, teachers, their peers and preachers.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

18. “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

19. “Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms: Islam is not a religion of peace.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

20. “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

21. “I want people to emphasize life before death as opposed to life after death.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Contrast this with the use by modern Islamic scholars of Muhammad’s decision to marry a six-year-old girl, consummating their marriage when she turned nine, to justify child marriage in Iraq and Yemen today.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

25. “If feminism means anything at all, women with power should be addressing their energies to help the girls and women who suffer the pain of genital mutilation, who are at risk of being murdered because of their Western lifestyle and ideas, who must ask for permission just to leave the house, who are treated no better than serfs, branded and mutilated, traded without regard to their wishes. If you are a true feminist, these women should be your first priority.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

26. “I love life more than I love death.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

27. “We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

28. “Most Muslims never delve into theology, and we rarely read the Quran; we are taught it in Arabic, which most Muslims can’t speak. As a result, most people think that Islam is about peace. It is from these people, honest and kind, that the fallacy has arisen that Islam is peaceful and tolerant.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

29. “Until Islam stops fixating on the afterlife, until it is liberated from the seductive story of life after death, until it actively chooses life on earth and stops valuing death, Muslims themselves cannot get on with the business of living in this world. Perhaps.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

30. “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

31. “When people say that the values of Islam are compassion, tolerance, and freedom, I look at reality, at real cultures and governments, and I see that it simply isn’t so. People in the West swallow this sort of thing because they have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically, for fear of being called racist. It fascinates them that I am not afraid to do so.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “There is in fact no good reason al-Ghazali and his ilk should have the last word in defining Islam. Muslims around the world cannot go on claiming that “true” Islam has somehow been “hijacked” by a group of extremists. Instead they must acknowledge that inducements to violence lie at the root of their own most sacred texts, and take responsibility for actively redefining their faith.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

36. “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.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

37. “Confronted with such flagrant acts of intolerance – such abuses of the freedom of speech – a free society must surely do more. For intolerance is the one thing a free society cannot afford to tolerate.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

38. “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

39. “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

40. “I grew up in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia, and in Kenya. I came to Europe in 1992, when I was 22, and became a member of Parliament in Holland.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you. In Islam, becoming an individual is not a necessary development; many people, especially women, never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the word islam: submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside your mind. But.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

46. “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

47. “Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

48. “You who call yourselves liberals must understand that it is your way of life that is under threat. Withdraw my right to speak freely, and you jeopardize your own in the future. Ally yourselves with the Islamists at your peril. Tolerate their intolerance at your peril.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

49. “The will of little girls is stifled by Islam. By the time they menstruate they are rendered voiceless. They are reared to become submissive robots who serve in the house as cleaners and cooks. They are required to comply with their father’s choice of a mate, and after the wedding their lives are devoted to the sexual pleasures of their husband and to a life of childbearing.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

50. “It’s not enough to say it’s shocking, it’s appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali