Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Interpretation
Free speech is essential for life and society.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie emphasizes the fundamental importance of free speech as a cornerstone of human existence and societal function. He conveys that the ability to express oneself freely is not just a right, but a vital component that sustains life, fosters dialogue, and shapes culture, making it indispensable to our humanity.
In practice
Citing this quote in a debate about the importance of protecting free speech rights.
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.
[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread... and a thousand other things of the same kind.
Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture.
People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do.
What difference is there in the color of the soul?
The Bible is the proper book for men. There the truth is distinguished from error far more clearly than anywhere else, and one finds something new in it every day. For twenty-eight years, since I became a doctor, I have now constantly read and preached the Bible; and yet I have not exhausted it but find something new in it every day.
Man always is perfect, or he never could become so; but he had to realise it.
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