It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
SALMAN RUSHDIEMasks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
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Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
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Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
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Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it’s not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked.
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A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
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I don’t dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don’t want that to be dictated to me either.
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
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Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
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Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest rages, black.
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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
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We are the storytelling animal.
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