Salman Rushdie Quotes

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.

The proper business of a University is ... not to tell us ... what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty; but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own beliefs in a manner worthy of intelligent beings.

I think criticism, or a critical engagement with history, has a good deal to do with a willingness to be fooled.

I was brought up in a home environment where I was taught to think critically and was encouraged to seek answers to questions about my faith.

You need philosophy. It sounds a little pompous but I think when you direct a film, the only way to find a response to the questions you keep asking yourself is to have a philosophy.

Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.

Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

My own ideals for the university are those of a genuine democracy and serious scholarship. These two, indeed, seem to go together.

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.

The declaration that any legal issue is "not an open question in a law school" is a declaration of war upon everything that a law school is. Most fundamentally, a law school is a place of intellectual inquiry, where the acceptability of ideas can only be determined by examining them.

Credulity without enquiry is a sure way to deceive oneself.

There is nothing more dangerous than mislearning the lessons of history.

The real question, therefore, is not whether students should be taught to think critically and self-reflectively, but instead what they should be thinking critically about.

You can learn a lot about the roots of your own beliefs and your own arguments by looking at history in ways that are difficult to do in the intensity of the moment now.

The American tradition rests on pillars of self-questioning, self-actualization, and disagreement.

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.

I went to a liberal arts college wherein grading was qualitative and we had to write our own evaluations.

I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.

Let the historians and the Ph.D. students work out their doctrines. I'm not interested in theories per se.

We know that if religion is allowed into schools, pupils will sometimes begin to question the teaching they receive.

The difference between eccentricity and originality in historical studies is often difficult to detect at first encounter. When a radically new interpretation of a large segment of history makes its appearance, time is needed to sift the evidence.

People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.

I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.