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.
SALMAN RUSHDIEThe world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
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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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Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’
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In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.
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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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It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
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But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.
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I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
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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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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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We all owe death a life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE