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 RUSHDIEThe lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.
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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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Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
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The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
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If you’re offended, it’s your problem.
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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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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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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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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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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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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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.
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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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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 think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
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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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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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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