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“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”
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“I think, as the writer, you're always going to mourn something [left out of a film]. But you also just want to know there's a good reason for it being left out. On the whole, you want to give something to somebody creative. The worst thing you can do is say, "Here, be creative, but do it like I want you to do it." I was always very mindful of that.”
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“The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.”
Source : "Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself". Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 07, 1994.
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“Some of the ideas that come from the fringe of the far right are just so implausible that it is hard to take those ideas seriously.”
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“It is a blind goose that cometh to the fox's sermon.”
Source : John Lyly, Leah Scragg (2003). “John Lyly 'Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit' and 'Euphues and His England': An Annotated, Modern-Spelling Edition”, p.242, Manchester University Press
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“Ho Chi Minh rarely wrote about Sun Tzu, but when he did mention the ancient Chinese military strategist, he was always laudatory, and he sometimes cited his ideas as a model for the Vietnamese revolutionary movement to follow.”
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“When someone forces me to do something I don't do it.”
Source : "Mo Yan accepts Nobel prize, defends 'necessary' censorship" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. December 11, 2012.
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“I am the maker of my own fortune, and Oh! that I could make that of my Red People, and of my country, as great as the conceptions of my mind, when I think of the spirit that rules the universe. I would not then come to Governor Harrison to ask him to tear up the treaty, and to obliterate the landmark, but I would say to him, "Sir, you have the liberty to return to your own country."”