Quote

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'

Salman Rushdie

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Cases
Intellectuals
Noam
Crazy
Extremist
Chomsky
American
Palestinian
Apologists
Often
Anti
Absurdly
Even
Terrorism
Deceased
Like
Case
Dismissed
Step
Extremists
Steps
Edward

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

Image
Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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
Image
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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
Image
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
Salman Rushdie
Image
I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
Salman Rushdie
Image
One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
Salman Rushdie
Image
If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?
Salman Rushdie
Image
I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
Salman Rushdie
Image
Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with Satanic Verses, because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
Salman Rushdie