If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
SALMAN RUSHDIEYou can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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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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Reality is a question of perspective.
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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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Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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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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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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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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I’ve been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems like he’s been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he’s been getting.
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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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What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
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If you’re offended, it’s your problem.
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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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Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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We all owe death a life.
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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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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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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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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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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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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