Salman Rushdie Quotes

China still faces mountains of problems. Some are historical legacies. Others might be the byproducts of our rapid development…. We still have a long way to go. Maybe it’s even good for individuals or nations to have a certain sense of insecurity. This can turn into motivation to work hard.

I don't believe that killing the French model in order to become the U.K. or the United States overnight is the solution. You have a big debate on inequality there, and for our society, a lot of inequality would not be bearable.

Nothing is insignificant in the history of a young community, and - above all - nothing seems impossible.

Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way.

Filipinos are not worse than any other colonized people except that our colonization was a little longer, and the independence movement was always dictated in political terms, never in social ones. We borrowed terms, but we didn't understand them.

The ethnic differences among Filipinos are very real. The paucity of arable land, for instance, explains the industry of the Ilokanos and the Cebuanos.

I don't know much about Britain. I've been working overseas for most of my adult life. So I'd like to see what sort of problems there really are here. It's a question of asking, 'Where are we going, how purposeful are we?' And see if there's anything that can be done to find possibilities for change.

I don't want to be a propagandist or say that Pakistan is just great. There are problems, but it is a much more complex place than we are given to believe.

People say law but they mean wealth.

Every time Germany has been unified, there has been war and suffering.

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

Thus I encountered one of the basic experiences of being an Irish American--the awareness that we had a political tradition that was not entirely admirable. It took quite a lot of time for me to realize it was also a basic American experience--this clash between ideal--in my case inculcated by nuns and Jesuits--and hard realities.

There has been a failure of leadership all over post colonial Africa to unite the country’s people.

History shows that when you have continuing income inequality it is an invitation to class conflict.

There is an increase in inequality in the early stages of development.

The spirit of nationalism springs from the deepest of human emotions. It rises from the yearning of men to be free of foreign domination, to govern themselves. It springs from a thousand rills of race, of history, of sacrifice and pride in national achievement.

Around the world, elites are making money. There are rich people everywhere! And they don’t contribute much to the development of their own countries.

Americans have historically been more willing than Europeans to tolerate high inequality levels if accompanied by strong economic growth and a healthy middle class.

The democratic political institutions of Western countries arose and matured as industrial capitalism matured. It was a time of historically unprecedented economic growth and the concomitant development of new social groupings and relationships. They arose in elite political cultures that were in the main ethnically homogeneous, even if, notably in the American case, the society at large was considerably less so.

The reason there IS a Turkey and there ISN'T a Kurdistan is in all of history no Kurd could ever stand by any other Kurd long enough to hold off all the hungry Arabs, Persians, Turks, Brits and other sand carnivores swimming around the Fertile Crescent.

Everything changes.... Social life changes, and with it the "national question" changes, too. At different periods different classes enter the arena, and each class has its own view of the "national question." Consequently, in different periods the "national question" serves different interests and assumes different shades, according to which class raises it, and when.

It is easy to decry the nature of ethnic politics in this country. We are hostages to history and the ethnic compartmentalization that began in the colonial era