Quotes from Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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.

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.

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.

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

There's peacetime and there's wartime, and you don't need polarization on wartime issues. You need polarization on all other issues.

Liberal capitalism is not perfect, but compared to the other 'isms,' it's far superior.

If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status, we could do it as well.

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.

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

I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.

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.

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

Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

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

I would rather clean than beg.

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.

But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

A Western woman is not her brother's or her father's property. She's just herself. She can choose her own lifestyle. But in a Muslim family, the honor of the man is between the legs of a woman.

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.

Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of western life. It is in the family that children are groomed to practise, promote and pass on the norms of their parents' culture.