Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.

Born in a cellar... and living in a garret.

I came from nothing.

I had a very hard life in Kazakhstan.

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.

I came from a place where there wasn't a lot of joy.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Full stomachs don't believe empty ones.

Poverty is no disgrace, but it's no honor either.

Bottom 10 Percent progressives are not enthusiastic about concentrations of wealth. But that's not what keeps them up at night. Their focus is on deprivation and lack of opportunity. They're motivated by empathy for people who are suffering, rather than outrage over unjustified wealth.

Terrorism thrives when the gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots' becomes so wide and when the 'have nots' reach the point of such desperation, pain, and agony that they have nothing to lose.

When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it.

There was a time when I had nothing. I lost everything.

I used to sleep on floors and face racial abuse.

I learnt a hard fact: that dignity is a luxury in our country.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

I think I'm just like a lot of people who had nothing.

Life is rough for a lot of people. Some people live in greater material circumstances than others, but life is rough for everybody.

My films are motivated by a keen interest in highlighting issues that affect marginalized populations who are caught in difficult circumstances.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

The hard part that I had to go through in life, period, is living in poverty and not being able to get what I want.