Salman Rushdie - History Quotes

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The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.

Salman Rushdie

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

Salman Rushdie

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

Salman Rushdie

Every pickle-jar…contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history.

Salman Rushdie

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

Salman Rushdie

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood.

Salman Rushdie

The history of life was not the bumbling progress — the very English, middle-class progress — Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

Salman Rushdie