Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.
Ali, Ayaan Hirsi. Infidel. Free Press, 2007.
Honore Gabriel Victor Requiti. The French King had just opened the French National Assembly which contained deputies (delegates) from the clergy, the nobility and the people. The King had made what some deputies thought was a very constructive and responsible speech opening the assembly. Mirabeau observed that as long as there was an absolute monarch in place, even a benign one. It was the presence of a monarch itself that was evil.
With so many revolutionary rulers of new nations suppressing all opposition, the history of Ataturk and Turkey is unique. Ataturk was so popular and his People’s Party so successful that there was no opposition and Turkey had one party rule. However, Ataturk was determined to have Turkey become a parliamentary democracy as good as the Western nations of Europe. So a tradition of multi-party democracy was needed. So Ataturk actually went to his friend Fethi Okyar and asked him to start an opposition party and oppose the government. Fethi was a strong supporter of the revolution and generally was in concurrence with Ataturk and the People’s Party on everything. Ataturk however convinced him that they had to start a tradition that would take Turkey through the future, and he did create a new party-- Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Liberal Republican Party) and worked hard to find differences with the People’s Party and the Government. One immediate contribution was the oversight that the new party provided—a strong tradition that exists to this day in Turkey.
This quotation is a great demonstration of how much wiser and the better politician of all the crowned heads of Europe that Queen Victoria was. There were stirrings of freedom and desire for parliamentary government throughout Europe. Queen Victoria, even though and perhaps because she was a young woman, had a great feel for fairness and reasonableness and had read a great deal of history. There were some radical red socialists calling for complete radical revolution scaring European Royalty profoundly. They reacted very conservatively and with reaction, reverting to more tyrannical practices of the past urged in that path by very conservative, right wing advisors. Victoria also had little respect for some of the monarchs who had little interest in their people and much with their personal power and wealth. In the end, it was England which was the only nation which never had a serious radical socialist / communist threat, and that had much to do with Victoria’s political acumen and wisdom.
His views are a mix of modernism and fundamentalism. He favors democracy and elections but also favored the Taliban destroying the great ancient Buddha statues when he was called an idol worshipper for urging the preservation of art.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist, feminist, author, scholar and former politician. She received international attention as a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, actively opposing forced marriage, honor violence, child marriage and female genital mutilation. She has founded an organisation for the defense of women's rights, the AHA Foundation. Ayaan Hirsi Ali works for the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.
