Salman Rushdie Quotes

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

Leaders glare at each other across the chasm of misunderstanding.

To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation.

It's finding those nonsensical pieces of conversation that we all do all the time. We do all the time. When we're talking on the telephone, there are arguments with people who agree when they both think that they disagree.

Divisiveness is not good for the people.

People who disagree on important issues don't agree on the facts.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

The news is increasingly full of mismatched people saying daft things to one another.

What we perceive things to be when they come out of our mouth is not what the listener perceives it to be. They think it differently. They're not your blood. They're not your mind. You get in an argument.

Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.

Political rhetoric leads only to confusion.

Not every time there's a disagreement is somebody lying.

A close friend can become a close enemy.

I will write plain & slow because I know you have no time to listen to trifles. This is no trifle. When one nation is at war with another, all the People of the one are the enemies of the other.... Most unfortunately the war in which we are now Engaged, has been complicated with the belief on the one hand that all on the other were not Enemies. It would have been better if at the outset this mistake had not been made, and it is wrong longer to be misled by it.

Mistrust and misunderstanding are the major obstacles for people getting together .

Goddamn bitch set me up!

Most of the people who have complaints with me aren't reading me.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

I had grown up seeing people in school where I felt like I needed to keep them at arm's length, or on the picket line, where there was a tonne of hostility and no time to build rapport with people.

The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don't know you're in.

That's how hatred is created: two different groups, each insisting they're on the moral high ground

It's amazing how much distance one truth can create between two people.

First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.

Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.

Most people argue over who's right, not about what the truth is.