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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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Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
People
Atheism
Dissent
Evidence
Censorship
Existence
Sparks
Society
Societies
Freedom
Strike
Free
Motion
Comes
Tension
Best
Strikes
Friction

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.
Salman Rushdie
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I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
Salman Rushdie
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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
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My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.
Salman Rushdie
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Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
Salman Rushdie
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The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
Salman Rushdie
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thought I was doing two things. One is inquiring into the phenomenon of revelation, if you are not a religious person. But, clearly, it's a sincere phenomenon.
Salman Rushdie
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The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
Salman Rushdie
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie
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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?
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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Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
Salman Rushdie
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This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
Salman Rushdie
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Ignorantly is how we all fall in love for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
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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We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
Salman Rushdie