If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.
Interpretation
Living in freedom should allow you to appreciate it without constant debate, but defending it becomes crucial when it is threatened.
This quote by Salman Rushdie emphasizes the significance of recognizing and appreciating the freedom present in free societies. When freedom is abundant, it may seem excessive to argue about it, yet the moment that freedom is challenged, individuals must actively defend it and articulate their beliefs to ensure its preservation.
In practice
In a speech about civil liberties at a public forum.
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.
Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.
People now live their lives like an open wound to be famous - they do bad things because they're rewarded for it.
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
Don't take anything personally. Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. Their point of view and opinion come from all the programming they received growing up. When you take things personally, you feel offended and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflict. You make something big out of something so little because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong.
Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. That is exactly what things were originally made for.
But to my mind, though I am native here, And to the manner born, it is a custom, More honored in the breach than the observance.
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