Daily Inspiration Quote by Salman Rushdie

History’s cruel party trick is its ability to normalize the nightmare. Rushdie’s line lands because it captures that sickening pivot point: the moment when what a society once dismissed as impossible or obscene slips into the realm of policy, routine, even common sense. “Human events” sounds almost neutral, like a textbook phrase, but the neutrality is the sting. He’s talking about coups and genocides, fatwas and censorship, lynch mobs and surveillance states - the full range of man-made “events” that arrive not as thunderclaps but as increments.

Rushdie’s intent is less philosophical than diagnostic. “The unthinkable becomes thinkable” names the mechanism by which extremism wins: not only through force, but through rehearsal. Repeat an idea long enough - that a writer deserves death, that a minority is a contagion, that rights are conditional - and the mind adapts. The sentence enacts that transformation with its mirrored structure: unthinkable/thinkable, a minimal linguistic shift that suggests how easily moral boundaries can be redrawn.

The subtext, especially coming from a novelist whose life was reshaped by the politics of offense, is a warning about imagination’s double edge. Fiction trains empathy and expands possibility, but propaganda does the same with brutality. Rushdie is reminding us that cultural vigilance isn’t melodrama; it’s maintenance. The terrifying part isn’t that the unimaginable happens. It’s that, before it does, we get used to imagining it.