Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
Interpretation
Disliking someone's ideas does not justify harming them.
This quote from Salman Rushdie highlights a fundamental ethical principle: that differing opinions and ideas, no matter how disagreeable, do not warrant violence or extreme actions against those who hold them. It serves as a reminder of the importance of tolerance, respect, and dialogue in a pluralistic society, emphasizing that the path to understanding should never involve the harm of others.
In practice
During a debate on free speech, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of tolerance.
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.
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.
Good advice is rarer than rubies.
Much faith will yield unto us here our heaven, but any faith, if true, will yield us heaven hereafter.
A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
All that glisters is not gold; Often have you heard that told: Many a man his life hath sold But my outside to behold: Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
When people have points of reference that are humanizing, that demystifies difference.
It hurts when God has to PRY things out of our hand!
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