The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.
SALMAN RUSHDIEFriendships 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.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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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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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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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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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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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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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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Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
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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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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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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
SALMAN RUSHDIE