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 soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it.
What is a loophole? If the law does not punish a definite action or does not tax a definite thing, this is not a loophole. It is simply the law.
Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.
Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs β in time, in space, and in potential β the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challenge is essential to their power and their attraction. War stories matter.
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