Salman Rushdie Quotes

A communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.

You have to understand that the I.D.W. emerged as a response to a world where perfectly reasonable intellectuals were being regularly mislabeled by activists, institutions, and mainstream journalists with every career-ending epithet from 'Islamophobe' to 'Nazi.'

I survived only a year in Berkeley, partly because I declined to sign the anticommunist loyalty oath.

Ward Churchill might be more valuable to the opponents of the academic left employed than unemployed. Above all, he can serve as a living window into the intellectual, moral, and political bankruptcy of the left.

I mean, I really don't want the federal government to be determining whether or not a person who feels certain ways about the environment or about animals or about certain religious issues should be considered an extremist. That to me is a type of thought control, mind control, which is very dangerous.

Well I've been crystal clear that we should not have schools which are set up by extremists whether they're Christian fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists or any other sort of outrageous and beyond the pale organization.

There's nothing new about European anti-Americanism. To go to a dinner party of intellectuals in Paris in 1960 was like walking into a tiger's den with a piece of raw meat in your hands.

I wasn’t allowed to study biology in my home town of Mississippi since it was thought to be part of a Communist plot.

The 'inability to have a dialogue' is increasingly the norm in academia. Conservative thought is not just unwelcome, oftentimes it is banished altogether.

You would think that American educators would want our kids, especially our kids from poorer families, to hear what top-rated Oxford students hear. But you'd be wrong. American schools now hide their students from ideas like mine if they don't approve of the man or the message.

The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.

We are not afraid of economic sanctions or military intervention. What we are afraid of is Western universities.

Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

The near-total control of the most prestigious universities and colleges by intolerant extremists of the left is breeding not only generations of entitled little authoritarians but legions of apologists for violence against their own perceived enemies.

At the end of the day, Osama bin Laden's interest is not Washington and New York, it's the Middle East. He wants Saudi Arabia. He wants to get rid of the House of Saud. There's a great deal of resentment, even inside the royal family, at the continued military presence of the United States there.

Stop seeing socialists and anti-Americans as Democrats. When a Michael Moore compares beheaders to our own Minutemen and laments that too many Democrats were in the World Trade Center, he deserves no platform alongside Wesley Clark or a seat next to Jimmy Carter or praise for his pseudo-dramas from high Democrats.

There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.

Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.

Nest of Soviet fellow travelers clacking busybodies in a Soviet jellyfish front, sitting here in Leesburg oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.

Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the '50s said it was going to be.

One modest suggestion for my friends in the academic community: the next time a mob of students, waving their non-negotiable demands, starts pitching bricks and rocks at the student union- just imagine they are wearing brown shirts or white sheets- and act accordingly.

Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?

One of the Taliban spokesmen said they have thousands of men who look forward to death like Americans look forward to living, which is great because we can arrange that. We'll set them up with death, we'll continue living.

It's very clear from what he [Osama ben Laden] said, what his lieutenants have said, that America is not even their main enemy. We're simply in the way of what they want to do in their own world, which is to destroy police states and Israel.

By that time [1966], we did begin to get some protests [against Vietnam War]. But not from liberal intellectuals; they never opposed the war.