What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
SALMAN RUSHDIEBetween the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
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So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
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Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’
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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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Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
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We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
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Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.
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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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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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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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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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Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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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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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It’s like that. If you’re going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.
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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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The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
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Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
SALMAN RUSHDIE