An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
Interpretation
The suppression of storytelling is a fundamental assault on what makes us human.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie emphasizes the critical role that storytelling plays in the human experience. He suggests that when our ability to share and hear stories is restricted, it undermines our very essence as beings who communicate, connect, and understand each other through narratives. This goes beyond mere censorship; it challenges the core of our identity and our shared humanity.
In practice
In a speech about freedom of expression, one might say, 'As Salman Rushdie stated, censorship is a crime against our nature as human beings.'
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.
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?
The quarrels and divisions about religion were evils unknown to the heathen. The reason was because the religion of the heathen consisted rather in rites and ceremonies than in any constant belief.
Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.
Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God.
We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx and Lenin and Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, and anybody else who ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that a revolution is a class struggle.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.