Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes

Christianity isn't the only group that has fundamentalists.

I was involved in an extreme or radical religious path from 1984-1989. I carried knives in the name of religious conflict. In point of fact, I felt something missing with the function of religion. I came to question whether Islam had truly commanded me to be exclusive and to isolate myself from other communities. There was a battle inside me…. I left that extremist group since it was impossible for me to survive in an exclusive community. Because Islam supports civilization, it should work for the betterment of human life. On the contrary, religious extremism and intolerance will destroy human civilization.

We seem to be the victims of religious dogma, both from the Christian Right here and, of course, in the East with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

The problem with Bush is that yes, he's religious in a fundamentalist sort of way, they read the Old Testament as a sort of charter for the chosen people to do what they like.

A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe.

I tell fundamentalists that there is no question of them attacking our Republic's foundations.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.

Today's Islamic fundamentalism is also a cover for political motifs. We should not overlook the political motifs we encounter in forms of religious fanaticism.

The truth is our country, our people, our liberties, and our way of life are under attack by radical Islamic terrorists who kill and destroy in the name of religion.

Fundamentalists from every religion have to be replaced, have to be disempowered.

Listen, a lot of religions have fundamentalists.

Moderates want their faith respected. They don't want faith itself criticized, and yet faith itself is what is bringing us all this - this lunacy.

Jewish extremism and Islamic fanaticism fed each other.

Obstinacy in religious understanding leads to backwardness as in Muslims’, prevalence of violence and intolerance.

Traditional Moslems have much the same outlook as traditional Jews and traditional Christians. On the other hand, radical Islam has been gaining ground…. Islam has been around for more than a millennium and radical Islam has only been around for a couple of hundred years.

With the fundamentalist Islamic fanatics of today, there is no dialogue possible either, because for them all others are “infidel dogs”. As soon as the Other becomes a wrongdoer or an infidel, dialogue becomes impossible.

Radical extremists have tried to use Islam as a cause for attacks on America. As I have stated before, they are not true followers of Islam. In my view they are simply terrorists, much like the so-called "Christians" of the white supremacy groups.

I want to be a martyr.

Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who’ve heeded, not hijacked, Islam.

In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox have formed a partisan bloc able to manipulate the political system even as it makes little effort to hide its contempt for secular democracy …. Israel is plagued by fundamentalism, but the country does not exist in a vacuum. Extremism is a disease that has infected its whole neighborhood, and the countries surrounding Israel suffer from far worse cases of it.

I make a clear distinction between the people and the ideology, between Muslims and Islam, recognizing that there are many moderate Muslims.

Mosques where sharia law prevails - they exist in France. Refusing to see that means that we do equate Islam with Islamic fundamentalism. We have to denounce and eradicate it.

I think being Jewish has been covered really well but almost nothing about being fundamentalist Protestant. For years, I've had a movie in my mind called 'Total Immersion' that looks to my life as a kid where you're immersed in this different worldview from almost everybody around you.

Religious extremism. We hear about it all the time. We see it all the time. Heck, most of us are just sick of talking about it all the time.

Terrorism and extremism bear different names and labels. It uses diverse causes. But in each case, it is driven by distortion of religion and a misguided belief in its power to succeed.