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Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.

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
Problem
People
Unfortunately
Defend
Argument
Speech
Stand
Free

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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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.
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In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen, but we don't live in a sane world.
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Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
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A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.
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Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
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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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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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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
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You don't that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that's a loss.
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Human beings do not perceive things whole we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.
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Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
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The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.
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It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.
Salman Rushdie
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The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
Salman Rushdie
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We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.
Salman Rushdie
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YouTube is full of pieces of trash. If you want to look on YouTube and find something that insults you, you can probably find it.
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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Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
Salman Rushdie
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We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
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My heart broke open and history fell in.
Salman Rushdie