Rita Symon > Rita's Quotes

“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam

“There are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations

“By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations

“People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors' traditions and mutilate my daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless? To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes? When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“I would rather clean than beg.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“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.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“As a reader, I could put on someone else's shoes and live through his adventures, borrow his individuality and make choices that I didn't have at home.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“You're only young once, but you can be immature forever”
― Germaine Greer

“Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.”
― Germaine Greer

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”
― Toni Morrison

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True

“Next to the true beauty and magic of the real world, supernatural spells and stage tricks seem cheap and tawdry by comparison. The magic of reality is neither supernatural nor a trick, but – quite simply – wonderful. Wonderful, and real. Wonderful because real.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Magic of Reality

“One would like to be loved, recognized, for what one is, and by everyone. But that is an adolescent desire. Sooner or later one must get old, agree to be judged, or sentenced, and to receive gifts of love … as unmerited. Morality is of no help. Only, truth … that is the uninterrupted seeking of it, the decision to tell it when one sees it, on every level, and to live it, gives a meaning, a direction to one’s march. But in an era of bad faith, the man who does not want to renounce separating true from false is condemned to a certain kind of exile - Albert Camus”
― Robert Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning

“I’ve learned less about people, since their destiny interests me more than their reactions, and destinies tend to repeat each other.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul”
― Albert Camus

“And as far as he was concerned, he needed to be listened to in order to believe in his life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays