Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes

When it comes to women, there has been a tendency to define women in sports in the context of their relationships - they watch games because their husbands watch. They're interested because their kids play a sport. They buy tickets to a sporting event because it's a way to spend time with family.

Certain things happened in the early church. Women who had never had any freedom suddenly have the ability to stand up and speak and be treated as equals within the life of the church.

I often think that woman is more free in Islam than in Christianity. Woman is more protected by Islam than by the faith which preaches monogamy.

Although the church has often been far too slow to follow his lead, Jesus' insistence that women, as well as men, bear the full image of God has had a way of sparking reform movements across the centuries.

My top priority for 2012 will be to make a renewed push for women's economic empowerment and political participation.

Women's sport helps break down a lot of barriers for women in other areas, whether in religion or politics.

If women are the key to Africa's future - and I believe they are - we must figure out how to take away the barriers to their participation.

A segregated spiritual subculture does women no good, even if it does have adorable butterflies in the logo.

I think in my own country, at the way we've seen through the ordination of women to the priesthood, which I'm delighted about, and that will move on to another level before very long.

Women are not all single-issue voters.

As to women, the Islamic faith has given women rights that are equal to or more than the rights given them in the Old Testament and the Bible.

However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.

When women are not at the negotiating table, their rights get negotiated away.

Women who chose to fight for their rights in the context of Islam and its teaching are breaking new paths that had been barred to them for over a millennium. The process has been slow and hard and different in different countries. Throughout, the most effective strategy has been to insist that Islam does not recognize intermediaries between God and the believers, and each Muslim has the right to discover her/his faith and engage with it through the very words of God as recorded in the Koran.

… the male abolitionists encouraged women to participate, not as equals, but to participate by creating resources, having sewing circles, bazaars, raising money so that the men could go out and lecture and create newspapers. And women accepted this for a while and then gradually they began to speak out. Women formed their own antislavery societies and within these societies they voiced their opinion about abolition.

There is no way in Israel that a street will be closed to women, there is no such thing. There never was and never will be.

I always thought that there was nothing an antifeminist would want more than to have women only in women's organizations, in their own little corner empathizing with each other and not touching a man's world.

Women's voices need to be in politics, and shaping politics from the very beginning, not serve as an afterthought.

How is our society going to progress if 50 percent of the population is not allowed to contribute?

If women are not accorded equal place in the leadership of the Catholic Church and the other great world religions, they will always be treated as inferiors in earthly matters as well.

You find in the Koran hundreds of verses to support women's rights, and perhaps four or five that do not.

Ultimately, a women's only championship is not going to get more females into motorsport as a whole.

If you look at the coverage of female sports and athletics across any of the broadcasters that participate in league rights and/or sports programming, women are underrepresented, and it's a chance and an opportunity for Lifetime to support that movement and the importance of athletics and competition for girls and women.

Of course, I'm all for women getting to play prominent parts.

What is best to hope for and what everyone is working towards is to elevate the quality of women's sport and to bring it to a level where it is seen as something that is very entertaining, something to be admired, to be looked up to, to put it in that level playing field as a product to be sold equal to the men.