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 RUSHDIEMy horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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.
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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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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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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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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
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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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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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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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Reality is a question of perspective.
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You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
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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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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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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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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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Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest rages, black.
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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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What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
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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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No, I don’t think it’s fair to label Islam ‘violent.’ But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.
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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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We are the storytelling animal.
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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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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
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Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE