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 RUSHDIEIn the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
-
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut 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 -
Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
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 RUSHDIE -
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
We all owe death a life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
SALMAN RUSHDIE