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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
Free
Motion
Comes
Tension
Best
Strikes
Friction
People
Atheism
Dissent
Evidence
Censorship
Existence
Sparks
Society
Societies
Freedom
Strike

More quotes by 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.
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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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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.
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That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.
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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.
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I did a lot of student acting when I was young.
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As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.
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I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
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With death comes honesty.
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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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I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
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The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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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.
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Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
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Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
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Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.
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Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.
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