1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

Here in America, the only words that didn’t exist, the only unspeakable words, were “I’m not sure about any of this. I’m having second thoughts.

Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.

I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity.

Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.

I don't want to admit that the savages are winning, that the jungle is creeping in and recapturing the civilized world--the jungle where the only law is the law of the jungle--but on many days every week that's how it feels.

Civilsation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.

All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering what the presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote-unquote free choices are legitimizing the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country."[Don’t allow religious hooligans to dictate terms (The Times of India, January 16, 2008)]