Clarity and consistency are not enough: the quest for truth requires humility and effort.

— Tariq Ramadan

Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.

— Tariq Ramadan

...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends their exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.

— Tariq Ramadan

Fasting is, first and foremost, an exercise for identifying and managing adversity in all its forms. With faith, in full conscience, fasting calls women and men to an extra degree of self-awareness.

— Tariq Ramadan

From Hinduism to the monotheism through to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the common message is that we are all, naturally and potentially, inclined to reject the other, and to be intolerant and racist. Left to our own devices and our own emotions, we can be deaf, blind, dogmatic, closed and xenophobic: we are not born open-minded, respectful and pluralist. We become so through personal effort, education, self-mastery and knowledge.

— Tariq Ramadan

History is replete with ideologies of freedom, justice, liberation of the downtrodden and the exploited, that have been turned against the very people they had mobilized, or that have reproduced the same logic of exclusion and terror toward those whom they claimed to set free.

— Tariq Ramadan

If people who cherish freedom, who know the importance of mutual respect and are aware of the imperative necessity to establish a constructive and critical debate, if these people are not ready to speak out, to be more committed and visible, then we can expect sad, painful tomorrows. The choice is ours.

— Tariq Ramadan

If there is a smoke, there is a fire, the saying goes, That is quite true, but one should find what the fire is, and who lit it.

— Tariq Ramadan

I have learned that one should say "Peace!" to those who shout their hatred for one's being and presence or at one's passage.

— Tariq Ramadan

Instantaneous and mass communication is the mother of mass naivety. Should we then lose hope? Is there any hope? But to lose hope is as dangerous as to nurture false hope. Where then can we find hope that is responsible?

— Tariq Ramadan