Nick Cohen > Quotes

“When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.”
― Nick Cohen

“London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.”
― Nick Cohen

“No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.”
― Nick Cohen

“The faster you strip cultures down, the more you find contrariness and disputation, rather than a solid core, until eventually you reach the individual, a mammal shaped by evolution, material needs, cognitive biases and historical circumstances no doubt, but still a creature with a better right to state his opinions than kings and clerics have to silence them.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“I hope I am not making the insulting error of pretending that democracies are as oppressive as dictatorships – such comparisons are the self-pitying and self-dramatising whines of spoilt Western children.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Michel Foucault believed that speech was truly free only when the weak took a risk and used it against the strong: ‘In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Wechsler and the New York Times showed that Adams’ two immediate successors as president, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as well as many others, regarded Adams’ political censorship of ‘seditious’ newspapers that criticised the state as a clear breach of the First Amendment and an attack on democracy.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Respect for religion is the opposite of religious tolerance, because it allows the intolerant to impose their will on others.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“But it is worth recalling the almost genocidal class hatreds of many leading liberal-left intellectuals, because they show that the motives of a part of the intelligentsia were anything but honourable. They did not want the welfare state to reward their fellow citizens for what they and their ancestors had suffered. They wanted the welfare state to transform them from brutes into men or women whose company Virginia Woolf could tolerate.”
― Nick Cohen, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

“Beyond the intermingling of their finances and interests, the Western rich and the oligarchic rich share an ideological affinity that is worth worrying about too: they are unshakeable in their belief that they are entitled to their wealth, and have every moral right to resist attempts to reduce it. It never occurs to them that they are lucky; that if they are Western speculators, they are lucky to have lived during a time when the negligent governments of America and Britain failed to regulate finance and allowed them to take incredible risks at no personal cost; that if they are post-communist oligarchs, they were lucky to be in place when the Soviet Union collapsed, and to have the connections and muscle to take control of the old empire’s raw materials. To outsiders their luck seems self-evident. Yet nowhere in the recorded utterances of the plutocracy does one find a glimmer of an understanding that time and chance played a part in their good fortune.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Their phobia was a fear of America and the West and modernity.”
― Nick Cohen, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

“parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Voltaire’s pointed question, ‘What to say to a man who tells you he prefers to obey God than to obey men, and who is consequently sure of entering the gates of Heaven by slitting your throat?”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“When the political partisan’s beliefs are insulted or ridiculed, he feels the ‘offence’ as deeply as any believer who has heard his god or prophet questioned. We do not, however, prohibit or restrict arguments about politics out of ‘respect’ for political ideologies, because we are a free society. We call societies that prohibit political arguments ‘dictatorships’, and know without needing to be told that the prohibiting is done to protect the ruling elite.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“separate cultures that couldn’t be criticized or understood by outsiders applying universal criteria. Nor, by extension, could any other culture, even if it was the culture of fascism, religious tyranny, wife burning or suicide bombing. Each separate cultural group was playing its own ‘language game’, to use the phrase the postmodernists took from Wittgenstein, and only players in the game, whether feminists or Holocaust deniers, could determine whether what was being said was right or wrong. As epistemic relativism infected leftish intellectual life, all the old universal criteria, including human rights, the search for truth and the scientific method, became suspect instruments of elite oppression and Western cultural imperialism.”
― Nick Cohen, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

“– so that’s it. It’s not that the writing is bad, it’s that the readers who think it’s bad are 98-pound weaklings who turn pale and sick at unsettling projects. They are ‘frightened off’, the poor cowardly things, by the ‘difficulty’ of theory – not the ineptitude, mind you, or the slavish imitativeness, or the endless formulaic repetition of repetition – no, the difficulty. So as a result they ‘can dismiss’ theory – not laugh at, not hold up to scorn and derision, or set fire to or thrust firmly into the bin or take back to the shop and loudly demand a refund – no, dismiss. And dismiss ‘as an effort to cover up in an artificially difficult style the fact that it has nothing to say’. Well – yes, that’s right, as a matter of fact. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.”
― Nick Cohen, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

“The victories of the Enlightenment, the vote, welfare, bills of rights, the separation of church and state and the emancipation of women, homosexuals and blacks, which previous generations had fought and on occasion died to achieve, were all now treated as parts of ‘the hegemonic’ and included in condemnations of a monolithic world order that made no distinctions.”
― Nick Cohen, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

“Foucault himself argued that liberal democracy was the worst form of tyranny. The Enlightenment that Westerners imagined had freed them had in fact enslaved them in insidious ways that Westerners were too stupid to see – with the exception of French philosophers.”
― Nick Cohen, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

“Writers write badly when they have something to hide. Clarity makes their shaky assumptions plain to the readers – and to themselves.”
― Nick Cohen, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

“When the Bengalis of East Pakistan revolted against a system that made them second-class citizens, the Pakistani army’s retaliation stunned a twentieth century that thought it had become inured to genocide.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“large section of white Western liberal opinion does not recognise that it is truly racist to refrain from condemning the clerics who seek to oppress them.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Vladimir Putin’s Russia is typical of dictatorships old and new. It does not try to censor everything. The regime understands that the total control of communism failed because it suppressed too much. On a personal level, the men at the top in the Kremlin do not want to go back to a time when the bribes they received were worth little because the luxuries of capitalism were on the other side of an iron curtain.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues. GEORGE ORWELL, 1946”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Manipulating the neck risks attacking the arteries that carry the blood to the brain. Because there is usually a delay between damage to the arteries and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic treatment and strokes went unnoticed for many years.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“The cops, however, took his satire on the chin and went on to guard him from assassins.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“By 2006, many liberals had abandoned the basic tenet of a free society that the intention of a speaker or writer is irrelevant to his or her right to enjoy freedom of speech and publication. If Flemming Rose had commissioned cartoons mocking America and the Bush administration had protested, liberals would have clasped him to their pounding chests, because his intention would have been good. But because he had allowed cartoonists to criticise Islam, albeit mildly, his intention was bad, and therefore the enemies of liberalism could take their revenge on him, his cartoonists and his country.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“reactionary,”
― Nick Cohen, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

“names of better and braver people than Assange could ever be in Afghanistan, China, Ethiopia and Belarus for their dictatorial enemies to find and charge with collaboration with the US.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom