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Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

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
Defense
Conservative
Rock
Unleashes
Rocks
Frightens
Freedom
Mechanisms
Music
Mechanism
People
Manner
Roll

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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optimism is a disease
Salman Rushdie
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I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world.
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Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
Salman Rushdie
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Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
Salman Rushdie
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Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.
Salman Rushdie
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Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
Salman Rushdie
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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
Salman Rushdie
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Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
Salman Rushdie
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A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
Salman Rushdie
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.
Salman Rushdie
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Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.
Salman Rushdie
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The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
Salman Rushdie
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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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The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.
Salman Rushdie
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Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
Salman Rushdie
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Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.
Salman Rushdie
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Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.
Salman Rushdie
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But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
Salman Rushdie
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India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
Salman Rushdie