"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."
-Salman Rushdie
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"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.“
-Salman Rushdie
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"The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you."
-Salman Rushdie
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"The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff."
-Salman Rushdie
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"I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968."
-Salman Rushdie
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"If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it."
-Salman Rushdie
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"What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy."
-Salman Rushdie
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"You do have to change things as warfare changes."
-Charles Schumer
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"My kid could get a bad X-ray and I could get a call from the doctor saying I have something growing in my bum and that would change my perspective on everything instantaneously, on what is and what is not important."
-Tom Hanks
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"What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later."
-Jonathan Sacks
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"Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it."
-Jonathan Sacks
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"Most of what needs to be changed in the euro zone can be done without treaty changes. The demand for treaty change is as political as it is legal and I don't think it's going to happen soon."
-Nick Clegg
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"Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives."
-Jonathan Sacks
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