Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.
Interpretation
The quote humorously critiques the ineffectiveness and annoyance of security checks in America.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie expresses the frustration many people feel regarding American security checks, suggesting that rather than genuinely increasing safety, these measures are more about creating inconvenience for travelers. Through humor, he highlights the absurdity of the situation, prompting a reflection on the balance between security and personal comfort in public spaces.
In practice
In conversation when discussing travel frustrations, you might say, 'As Salman Rushdie wisely noted, anyone who has gone through American security checks knows they are just meant to annoy us.'
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
I ain't no movie star, man. I'm a booty star.
The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.
Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.
I have no intention of retiring; I can't imagine not doing stand-up. That's where I started and where I'll be.
The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.
All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the bread line - right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.
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