Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.
Interpretation
The quote humorously critiques the ineffectiveness and annoyance of security checks in America.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie expresses the frustration many people feel regarding American security checks, suggesting that rather than genuinely increasing safety, these measures are more about creating inconvenience for travelers. Through humor, he highlights the absurdity of the situation, prompting a reflection on the balance between security and personal comfort in public spaces.
In practice
In conversation when discussing travel frustrations, you might say, 'As Salman Rushdie wisely noted, anyone who has gone through American security checks knows they are just meant to annoy us.'
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.
I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.
Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. Senators.
Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.
A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
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