Quote

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.

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
Used
Enlightenment
Writers
Refusing
Weapons
Limiting
Accept
Blasphemy
Accepting
Deliberately
Church
Weapon
Thought
Points
Power
French

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Nobody ever recognizes themselves unless they are not the character. There are many people who have claimed to be in my books, but unfortunately they were usually people that I didn't know.
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My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
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If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
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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.
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I for one don't need a supreme sacred arbiter in order to be a moral being.
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I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.
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I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
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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.'
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The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.
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I get a lot of letters - a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?
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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?
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If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
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If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
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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.
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She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!
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One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.
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There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
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Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And as long as what you're saying is what you truly, honestly believe to be the case, then whatever the consequences, that's fine. That's an honorable position.
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
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