Quote

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.

Salman Rushdie

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
People
Either
Upset
Courses
Discover
Course
Particularly
Detest
Free
Material
Defending
Often
Agree
Trick
Find
Materials
Defend
Believe
Speech
Tricks
Really
Cases
Personally

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

Image
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.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
Salman Rushdie
Image
There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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.'
Salman Rushdie
Image
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman Rushdie
Image
You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
Salman Rushdie
Image
A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
Salman Rushdie