Salman Rushdie Quotes

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

Speech is not violence. The Left conflates the two in order to justify its own violent reactions to differing points of view.

Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.

Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn't like what people were doing.

You work your butt off and somebody says you can't have your record played because it offends them. Tyrants are made of such stuff.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

You can't cheer when political officials punish the expression of views you dislike and then expect to be taken seriously when you wrap yourself in the banner of free speech in order to protest state punishment of views you like and share.

Every censorship, however good its intent, degenerates inevitably into tyranny.

It is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

Sometimes it’s a short step from banning to burning.

Other peoples, at other times, as well as our Southern brethren at present, have felt that the suppression of general discussion was necessary to the preservation of a prized and peculiar institution. Spain, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland have all, at different times, experienced the forced suppression of some one branch of political or religious thought. Their histories have recorded the effect of that suppression; and the rule to be deduced therefrom is simply this: If the people among whom such suppression is attempted are ignorant, and are kept so as part of a system, the attempt may be successful, though in its results working destruction to the community; — if, however, they are intelligent, and the system incautiously admits into itself any plan of education, the attempt at suppression will be abandoned, as the result either of policy or violence. In this respect, then, on philosophical grounds, the Cotton dynasty is not likely to favor the education of the masses..

It is pretty safe to assume that any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.

If any person has a good word for the previous government that is good enough for me to have him shot.

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

There are so many people that are offended by debate and free speech that sometimes governments cower. It's just way easier to play into the hands of people who are totalitarian.

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'

To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to murder germinating life.

When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.