One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
Interpretation
Defending free speech requires tolerance for ideas and individuals that may be offensive or disagreeable.
This quote by Salman Rushdie highlights the challenge of defending the principle of free speech, as it often involves supporting the rights of individuals whose views or actions we may find repugnant. It requires a commitment to uphold the fundamental right to express diverse and sometimes controversial opinions, even when they clash with our own values or sensibilities.
In practice
During a debate about censorship, this quote can be used to underline the importance of protecting free speech.
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.
Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.
I'm not alive. People believe memories grow vague, are erased by time, since nothing endures against the passage of time. That's the difference; time does not pass over me, over us. It doesn't erase anything, doesn't undo it. I'm not a live. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it.
Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing.
How powerful is man! He is able to do all that God wishes him to do. He is able to accept all that God sends upon him.
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