top of page
Exlpore more Politics quotes

"You can become a politician and improve the institutions of power in your country."

"The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike."

"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau."

"The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

"Politics is not leadership. It never has been. It never will be."

"The freest societies are in a constant state of revolution."

"There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds. Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant."

"Patriotism is the narcissism of countries."

"Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions."

"Some people had attack dogs. Ghastek had attack lawyers."
Explore more quotes by Salman Rushdie


"Forget the soul. No such ghost in the machine. What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind."


"A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep."


"In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects."


"When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another."


"Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone."


"The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism."
bottom of page