Top 100 Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “If this incomplete ayaan hirsi wants fame sooo much then she shouldn’t use religion as a base to be known. Some people justify their in justifications by selling their souls to the devil, ayaan I’m sure u have taken the time to read the bible. Do tell me it’s stance on woman comparing to men...”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

53. “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

54. “Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

55. “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

56. “I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

57. “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

58. “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

59. “I can well remember how when someone in my family lay sick or dying – like my aunt when she contracted breast cancer – the Qur’an was chanted by the bedside, in the belief that its words alone would cure the patient. Analogies with Christian prayer are misleading because the reciter of the Qur’an is voicing God’s words, not appealing to God for intercession.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

60. “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

61. “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

62. “Most of all, I think it was the novels that saved me from submission. I was young, but the first tiny, meek beginnings of my rebellion had already clicked into place.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

63. “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

64. “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

65. “No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that’s what the West is all about.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

66. “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

67. “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

68. “You could see her face, because she was Somali. Saudi women had no faces.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

69. “Finally Abdellahi Moussa Boqor asked, “So why are you doing this?” I paused for a moment, and then the words just came out of my mouth. “It is the will of the soul,” I said. “The soul cannot be coerced.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

70. “Charles Murray, who in 1994 cowrote The Bell Curve. When his book was published I was still a student at the University of Leiden, where it seemed everyone was talking about this horribly racist book that argued that black people were genetically of lower intelligence than white people. I read it, of course, and I found it to be the opposite of racist, a compassionately written book about the urban challenges that confront black people more than white. All black people should read it.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

71. “The argument in this book is that religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform. Non-doctrinal factors – such as the Saudis’ use of oil revenues to fund Wahhabism and Western support for the Saudi regime – are important, but religious doctrine is more important. Hard as it may be for many Western academics to believe, when people commit violent acts in the name of religion, they are not trying somehow to dignify their underlying socioeconomic or political grievances.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

72. “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. And we need to say unambiguously to Muslims living in the West: If you want to live in our societies, to share in their material benefits, then you need to accept that our freedoms are not optional. They.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

73. “I’d like Muslims to look at their religion as a set of beliefs that they can appraise critically and pick and choose from.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

74. “I found myself thinking that the Quran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans. It is one version of events, as perceived by the men who wrote it 150 years after the Prophet Muhammad died. And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

75. “The exercise of my reason itself was forbidden. But the questions never stopped coming, eventually leading to this one: “Why would a benevolent God set up the world like this, marking one half of the population to be second-class citizens? Or was it just men who did this?”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

76. “People in the West... have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically for fear of being called racist.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

77. “I was learning that in these extremely civilized circles, conflict is dealt with in a very ornate and hypocritical manner.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

78. “In short, the liberation of the individual conscience from hierarchical and priestly authority opened up space for critical thinking in every field of human activity.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

79. “I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

80. “Hard as it may be for many Western academics to believe, when people commit violent acts in the name of religion, they are not trying somehow to dignify their underlying socioeconomic or political grievances.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

81. “If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

82. “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

83. “Paradoxically, Islam is the most decentralized and yet, at the same time, the most rigid religion in the world. Everyone feels entitled to rule out free discussion.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

84. “When I look at people talking about intersectionality, what I see is the human being magnifying a biological attribute, and then putting them aside, putting them in a corner as victims of oppression... I most certainly don’t see myself as a victim.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

85. “The rule of clerics is totalitarian. It means people can’t choose. Humanity is varied, and we should celebrate that instead of suppressing it.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

86. “Furthermore, she told me, I was not permitted for one second to imagine that perhaps the Quran’s words could be adapted to a modern era.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

87. “Multiculturalism helps immigrants postpone the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and inappropriate. It locks people into corrupt, inefficient, and unjust social systems, even if it does preserve their arts and crafts. It perpetuates poverty, misery, and abuse.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

88. “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

89. “People had contested the whole basis of the idea of God’s power on earth, and they had done it with reasoning that was beautiful and compelling. Darwin said creation stories were a fairy tale. Freud said we had power over ourselves. Spinoza said there were no miracles, no angels, no need to pray to anything outside ourselves: God was us, and nature. Emil Durkheim said humans fantasized religion to give themselves a sense of security.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

90. “Abeh would always protest, and quote the Quran: “Paradise is at the feet of your mother!” But when we looked down at them, our mother’s bare feet were cracked from washing the floor every day, and Abeh’s were clad in expensive Italian leather shoes.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

91. “Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture’s intolerance.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

93. “The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

94. “Before the Brotherhood came, you could see everyone’s arms and legs. We never used to notice. But now that woman are covering so much, all I can think about is those round calves and silky arms and the hair, smelling of coconut. I never used to think about a neck before, but ooh, a neck is so sexy now.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

95. “There is another viewpoint that must be stated without equivocation: if Muslims want to immigrate to open and developed societies in order to better themselves, then it is they who must expect to do the adapting. We no longer allow Jews to run separate Orthodox courts in their communities, or permit Mormons to practice polygamy or racial discrimination or child marriage. That is the price of “inclusion,” and a very reasonable one.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

96. “The good times, when the rains came and made everything green, when streams of water suddenly raced through the dried riverbeds and there was milk and meat in abundance. She tried to teach us how that led to decadence: how when the grass grows green, herders become lazy and children grow fat.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

97. “A key problem for Islam today can be summarized in three simplifying sentences: Christians worship a man made divine. Jews worship a book. And Muslims worship both.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

98. “His name meant “He Who Fasts for a Hundred Days,” and in person he more than lived up to his name. He was so thin that he looked like skin stretched over bone. While Sister Aziza wore the hijab, Boqol Sawm wore a Saudi robe, a bit short, so that it showed his bony ankles.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

99. “It is possible to free oneself – to adapt one’s faith, to examine it critically, and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the root of oppression.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

100. “The argument in this book is that religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali