Brendan O'Neill

“This represents more than ‘cancel culture’, more than another cynical effort by the elites to circumscribe what may be said on a particular issue. It represents an overturning of the virtues of the Scientific Revolution itself, and of that central freedom of Enlightenment: the freedom to question authority.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

“Only by being free to think for ourselves do we become fully human, he said: ‘Our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs.’ To police and shrivel the sphere of public discussion is to frustrate the search for truth itself, Milton said, by ‘hindring and cropping the discovery that might yet be further made both in religious and civill Wisdome’.67 Truth is not something to be bestowed on us from on high – it is something we endeavour to discover ourselves through free thought, free debate and the free exchange of ideas with our fellow human beings. Resisting and challenging the libel that says humanity is a toxic force is the first step towards restoring the liberty and confidence we will need if we are to navigate whatever nature throws at us.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable