“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?”
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?)
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Salman Rushdie 122
British Indian novelist and essayist 1947Related quotes
“As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.”
Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", p. 178.
Edict to the people of Bostra, as quoted in Documents of the Christian Church (1957) by Henry Bettenson <!-- Oxford University Press -->
General sources
Context: I had imagined that the prelates of the Galilaeans were under greater obligations to me than to my predecessor. For in his reign many of them were banished, persecuted, and imprisoned, and many of the so-called heretics were executed … all of this has been reversed in my reign; the banished are allowed to return, and confiscated goods have been returned to the owners. But such is their folly and madness that, just because they can no longer be despots, … or carry out their designs first against their brethren, and then against us, the worshippers of the gods, they are inflamed with fury and stop at nothing in their unprincipled attempts to alarm and enrage the people.
Bishop Robert Reed: Living God's will 'has been the joy of my life' https://thebostonpilot.com/article.asp?ID=177278 (August 26, 2016)
“I've heard that the best way to help poor people is to make sure you don't become one of them”
Source: The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life
Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in (August 25, 2016)