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And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel?

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
Weak
Merciful
Birth
Cruel
Strength
Generous
Religion
Compromise
Strong
Test
Two
Tests
Accommodate
Give
Using
Suggests
Giving
Weakness
Bend

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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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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Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.
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The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.
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I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true.
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There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives.
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I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
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The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
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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.
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India is my kid sister.
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Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
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Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. It's finished, we tell one another, it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.
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Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
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Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer it's just to annoy you.
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Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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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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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.
Salman Rushdie