"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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"There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.“
-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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"Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers."
-Carlos Fuentes
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"If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society."
-Strom Thurmond
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"For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats."
-Harry Browne
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"There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations."
-Claude Vorilhon
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"This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?"
-Azar Nafisi
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"What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history."
-Barney Frank
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