Salman Rushdie: Doing
Salman Rushdie is British Indian novelist and essayist. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Address at Columbia University (1991)
Context: Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time. And throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme, and just as the recently destroyed "Actually Existing Socialism" of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit.
There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.
Address at Columbia University (1991)
Context: For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair." … And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? … What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give in to despair … because … I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the … upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a … novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its … victim) and the scapegoat for … its discontents…. (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)
“How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.”
Source: Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)
“It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.”
"Outside The Whale" in Granta (1984) http://web.archive.org/web/20110618004653/http://www.granta.com/Magazine/11/Outside-the-Whale/Page-2
Real Time with Bill Maher TV show (7 October 2005)