Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
SALMAN RUSHDIELiterature 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.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
-
The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
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 RUSHDIE -
If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
If you’re offended, it’s your problem.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
SALMAN RUSHDIE