A Quote by Salman Rushdie
A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.
Related Quotes
I'm not a little, shifty guy who likes to make moves. I like to be a straight-line guy, run over somebody if I can.
If a university official's letter accusing a speaker of having a proclivity to commit speech crimes before she's given the speech - which then leads to Facebook postings demanding that Ann Coulter be hurt, a massive riot and a police-ordered cancellation of the speech - is not hate speech, then there is no such thing as hate speech.
The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.
[The Muse of our Fiction of the future] will lead you - if you are humble and honest with her - straight into a World of Working Men, crude of speech, swift of action, strong of passion, straight to the heart of a new life.
Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.
Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.
It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent.
Art is the filigrain of a little mind, and is twisted and involved and curled, but would reach farther if laid out in a straight line.
I've never been one of those who is attracted to straight men. Like I always said, 'you're straight, so there's no point' and I have friends who are pursuers of the heterosexual men. They see it as conquests, which I think is a different thing and a more narcissistic thing. And not necessarily a healthy thing.
I think in three or four years, there are going to be a whole lot more people who don’t think it’s necessary to figure out if you’re gay or straight. It’s like, just do your thing.
I really believed Obama when he spoke in 2008, but I remember watching his victory speech after this last election and it was the same speech. Exactly the same speech. I felt like he didn't even believe it anymore. He seemed to be tired of saying the same thing.
Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.
I think free speech is probably the coolest thing we have in this country, and again, you can label it hate speech and dismiss it, and then you're allowed to censor it.
Going on tour for 10 years straight and playing 200-plus shows a year, you can't ever come back from that mentally. You're twisted in a weird way where you need that in order to be a person still.
I love that I can talk to my fans through Twitter, to cut out the middle man. Because I've done interviews where my words have gotten twisted, so it's nice to be able to have things coming straight from me.
Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wave-lengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word-perfect. Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do nothing more.
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