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Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

Salman Rushdie

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Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
History
Purity
Human
Possess
Humans
Explanation
Havoc
Throughout
Wrought
Total
Claimed
Mere
Fanaticism
Beings
Apostles
Among
Mixed

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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
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Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.
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Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
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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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The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
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Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
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Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.
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A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him... Not only the need to be believed in, but the need to believe in another. You've got it: Love.
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Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
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I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
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Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
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My heart broke open and history fell in.
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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
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