"In the free speech field, you find yourself constantly defending stuff that you really don't like," author Salman Rushdie said during an interview with Princeton University professor Bernard Haykel on Wednesday night. "You defend it not as itself but for its right to be."
"I think if we give up that principle, we're losing something very, very important," he continued. "If we can't trust ourselves as a culture to accommodate ideas we don't like, then our ideas lose their value as well, because they become authoritarian."
