Salman Rushdie Speech Quotations

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.

But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.

You don't just - you often have to defend the freedoms of people you don't like, you know, whose work you don't like, because freedom of speech is not just for serious people. It's also for trashy people. So, and, unfortunately, this is at the trashy end of the scale.

It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.

Free speech is life itself.

If you listen to the urban speech patterns in India you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.