Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
Interpretation
Disliking someone's ideas does not justify harming them.
This quote from Salman Rushdie highlights a fundamental ethical principle: that differing opinions and ideas, no matter how disagreeable, do not warrant violence or extreme actions against those who hold them. It serves as a reminder of the importance of tolerance, respect, and dialogue in a pluralistic society, emphasizing that the path to understanding should never involve the harm of others.
In practice
During a debate on free speech, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of tolerance.
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.
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.
Good advice is rarer than rubies.
Should at that moment the full moon Step forth upon the hill, And memories hard to bear at noon, By moonlight harder still, Form in the shadows of the trees, - Things that you could not spare And live, or so you thought, yet these All gone, and you still there, A man no longer what he was, Not yet the thing he planned.
Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.
I'm German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn't exist any more.
The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.
When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either heβs a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.
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