Quotes from Nick Cohen

The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz.

Former lefties can make a good living in the media by attacking their ex-comrades - I'd do it myself if the price was right.

No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.

Respect for religion is the opposite of religious tolerance, because it allows the intolerant to impose their will on others.

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.

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.

Their phobia was a fear of America and the West and modernity.

2005 study of British chiropractors found that 77 per cent did not seek informed consent.

freedom to speak includes the freedom to be wrong.

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes – an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.

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.

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.

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?

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.

that perennial type of middle-class girl whose revolt against parental authority consists of a search for more domineering masters than her parents had ever been.

the demands of the scientific method. Before his colleagues would allow him to put a scientific paper into the public domain, they tore into his ideas, challenging his premises, doubting his methods and questioning his ability. It never occurred to Singh that he could sue a critic of his work, even if the criticism was damaging to his reputation or wholly misguided.

Trying to maintain a 'strong, pervasive, powerfully internalised' religious conviction in a world that can manage without religious explanations creates perpetual tensions, however. The

They are not the vanguard for a new age of piety, but reactionaries, who hope that if they indoctrinate and intimidate they can block out modernity. Their desires mock their hopes. The rifles they fire, the nuclear weapons they crave come from a technology that has no connection to their sacred texts.

have seen billionaires, including convicted criminals, extract admissions of guilt from British newspapers too poor or too frightened to fight, and use them to convince journalists and politicians around the world that legitimate criticisms of their actions were groundless.