“...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes...”

“If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even le...”

“For a long while I have believed this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Camas belief in a fourth function of outsideness that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky o...”

“It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.”

“No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”

“During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that...”

“To a coward, courage always looks like stupidity.”

“The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.”

“But instead of spending our lives running towards our dreams, we are often running away from a fear of failure or a fear of criticism.”

“The ugliest government is the one which is spreading fear to its own people! The finest government is the one which encourages its own people to criticize the government harshly.”

“Truthfully, wicked people reveal themselves in words first, to inhibit speech would inhibit us seeing the wicked before they act.”

“Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the fi...”

“Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire.”