Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
This is exactly how minds are opened: through honest, frank dialogue. Tears may be shed, but not blood.
Quotes to Explore
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I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don't contract them.
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Instead of building walls, we should be building bridges.
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What I generally get from being in Africa is a sense of warmth and openness. As a stranger, you are always welcomed into people's homes and people are always offering you food. That generosity is incredibly touching.
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I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.
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A woman who places a high priority on performance and excellence is seen as imperial. A man is seen as demanding and tough.
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It's abhorrent to me that somebody is just evil, and you can't explain it.
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I educated myself. To me, school was boring.
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Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.
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Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
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Ice-skating is a dangerous proposition and tennis is going to be something I'm probably not very good at.
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Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
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I joke that we're not dissimilar to a rock band in the '70s.
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I know everyone in the Philippines is happy.
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To have a sense of style, it shows you know yourself. People like that.
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A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
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When India got independence, entrepreneurs were seen as a bad lot, as people who would exploit.
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Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows - and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere.
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I'm very pro-American - my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream.
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I acted like a human male. When I act like a human male it doesn't make me less human, it just makes me less female.
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I'm kind of like an open wound all the time, and that's hard. It's hard to deal with, especially in this industry. Every time I leave a movie, I feel like I'm going to die. Because you connect with these people, and then they all leave. I wish I wasn't like that, but I am.
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Heaven is a place where God will personally wipe away our tears.
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At the same time, the daughters, in adulthood, must also make the effort to really know their mothers—which many daughters do not—in order to understand what forces shaped those mothers. These daughters need to discover what torment may have unwittingly informed their mothers’ parental choices, and to see their mothers as composites of strengths and weaknesses, rather than as all good or all bad.
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How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
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This is exactly how minds are opened: through honest, frank dialogue. Tears may be shed, but not blood.
