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‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

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
Life
Meaning
Satire
Like
Growth
Phrase
Respect
Fearless
Religion
Religions
Fear
Phrases
Inspirational
Code
Become
Criticism
Ideas
Deserve
Disrespect

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
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Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
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What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
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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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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.
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Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images they fight for the same territory.
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I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
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History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.
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There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
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I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
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What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
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You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.
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You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
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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.
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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.
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Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.
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I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.
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I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
Salman Rushdie
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Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'
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Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
Salman Rushdie