Leadership Quote by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Politeness can be a form of condescension, and Hirsi Ali is daring you to admit it. “Avoiding offense” sounds like civic virtue, but she frames it as a soft hierarchy: the powerful speak plainly, the “protected” are handled with padded language. In her formulation, the urge to tiptoe around certain beliefs or identities isn’t empathy; it’s an implicit claim that some people are too fragile, too sacred, or too dangerous to meet on equal terms in open argument.

The line works because it flips the usual moral scoring. Offense, typically treated as social failure, becomes evidence of genuine engagement: if you’re truly equals, you’re allowed to disagree without special exemptions. The subtext is liberal in the classical sense and combative in the post-9/11 sense: speech rights are the baseline, not something negotiated with the most offended party. It also reads as a rebuke to institutions - universities, media, political parties - that manage conflict through etiquette rather than candor, confusing harmony with justice.

Hirsi Ali’s biography sharpens the stakes. As a former Dutch MP and a high-profile critic of Islamist orthodoxies who has lived under threat, she’s not offering a seminar-room paradox. She’s arguing from a life in which “respect” can function as a gag and “tolerance” can mean leaving dissenters trapped inside their community’s taboos. There’s a provocation here, too: if you equate equality with the right to offend, you risk trivializing power imbalances. Still, as a political instrument, the line is clean: it weaponizes liberal egalitarianism against the culture of deference.