Top 100 Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes (2025 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. “It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

7. “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

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

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

9. “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

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. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “All scriptures contain contradictions and the Qur’an is no exception.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

31. “I have faith, but I have faith in human reason.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

32. “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

33. “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

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

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

35. “Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn’t make it easier.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

36. “A woman who is baarri is like a pious slave. She honors her husband’s family and feeds them without question or complaint. She never whines or makes demands of any kind. She is strong in service, but her head is bowed. If her husband is cruel, if he rapes her and then taunts her about it, if he decides to take another wife, or beats her, she lowers her gaze and hides her tears. And she works hard, faultlessly. She is a devoted, welcoming, well-trained work animal. This is baarri. If.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

37. “I assume the closest members of my family don’t actually want to kill me, but the truth is that I have shamed and hurt them; they have to deal with the outrage that my public statements cause, and undoubtedly some members of my clan do want to kill me for that.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

38. “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

39. “It even contains rules on what types of blows are permissible when a husband beats his wife.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

40. “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

41. “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

42. “I would rather clean than beg.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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