Salman Rushdie Quotes About Religion

Quotes about: Religion

• In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?

  Salman Rushdie

  Issues, Blood, World Religions

  "Religion, as ever, is the poison in India's blood" by Salman Rushdie, www.theguardian.com. March 8, 2002.

• The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

  Salman Rushdie

  Atheist, Ideas, Religion

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “Is nothing sacred?”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

• God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.

  Salman Rushdie

  Years, Religion, Atheism

  "In God We Trust". Essay by Salman Rushdie, 1985.

• ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

  Salman Rushdie

  Inspirational, Life, Ideas

  "Salman Rushdie Voices Support for Charlie Hebdo After Paris Shooting". www.hollywoodreporter.com. January 7, 2015.

• Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.

  Salman Rushdie

  Inspirational, Life, Practice

• Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

  Salman Rushdie

  Atheist, Religion, Fundamentalism

• To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim.[...] I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.

  Salman Rushdie

  Ideas, Religion, Islam

• To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him... If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of 'dissing,' then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police.

  Salman Rushdie

  Police, Religion, Dissing

  Salman Rushdie (2008). “Step Across This Line”, p.81, Random House

• I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

  Salman Rushdie

  Reality, Ideas, Religion

• If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

  Salman Rushdie

  Religion, Sound, One Sentence

• I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.

  Salman Rushdie

  Thinking, Religion, Atheism

  "Who is Salman Rushdie?" by Firas Al-Atraqchi, www.mediamonitors.net. November 23, 2001.

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