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.
SALMAN RUSHDIEScience 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.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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 stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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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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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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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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When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
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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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He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
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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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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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Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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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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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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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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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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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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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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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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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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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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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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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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