Quote

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

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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
Human
Dies
Orthodoxy
Humans
Freedom
Ceases
Without
Language
Cease
Even
Makes
Challenge
Art
Exist
Orthodoxies
Cannot
Expression
Satirize
Littles
Challenges
Imprisoned
Little
Imagination
Offend

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Is birth always a fall?
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Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.
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So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
Salman Rushdie
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The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award is a way of spotlighting individual cases. If you look at the history of the award, the freedom rate is very high: a very high percentage of people who receive those awards are freed in the next six months to a year. The only weapon there is attention, but interestingly it works.
Salman Rushdie
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If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.
Salman Rushdie
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Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.
Salman Rushdie
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The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.
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I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.
Salman Rushdie
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In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.
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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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We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.
Salman Rushdie
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Raif Badawi's is an important voice for all of us to hear.
Salman Rushdie
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Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
Salman Rushdie
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The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument.
Salman Rushdie
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I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
Salman Rushdie
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Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite our hopes spill over its rim.
Salman Rushdie