The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.
Interpretation
Being labeled as 'controversial' can lead people to search for conflict even when it does not exist.
This quote by Salman Rushdie highlights the challenges of being perceived as controversial. It suggests that when someone is labeled as such, it creates an expectation of conflict, prompting others to seek out or impose trouble where none is intended. This can lead to misunderstandings and unnecessary confrontations, reinforcing the idea that perceptions can shape reality.
In practice
In a discussion about freedom of speech, this quote can illustrate the complications of being labeled controversial.
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.
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand.
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.