But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
Interpretation
Terrorism cannot be justified as a means to achieve legitimate goals, as it primarily seeks to harm innocents.
This quote by Salman Rushdie emphasizes the point that terrorism is fundamentally about violence and destruction rather than the pursuit of any righteous or noble objectives. It challenges the notion that perpetrators might claim their violent actions serve a higher purpose, highlighting that their true aim is the murder of innocent individuals, thereby creating a moral distinction between terrorism and valid political discourse or action.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the ethics of violence in political movements.
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.
It is racist, and it was racist when it was created. The Indian Act controls, or seeks to control, the lives of all indigenous people in a way that you and I would never accept.
I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you're supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it's not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.
In the light of the Divine Goodness, it seems to me, though others may think differently, that ingratitude is the most abominable of sins and that it should be detested in the sight of our Creator and Lord by all of His creatures who are capable of enjoying His divine and everlasting glory.
Peace visits not the guilty mind.
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.
We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.
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