Salman Rushdie Quotes
There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
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.
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
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.
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.
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.
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
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.
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.
The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.
We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
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.
How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.
Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
Science 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.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
