Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
SALMAN RUSHDIEBut 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.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.
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If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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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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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
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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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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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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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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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Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
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