Quotes from Nick Cohen

The faster you strip down the respectful arguments for religious censorship, the more you see the nation, tribe or community splintering, until you are left with one group of individuals with coercive power behind them demanding the right to censor another group of individuals because they disagree with them.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues. GEORGE ORWELL, 1946

If rights are good enough for you, then they are good enough for everyone else.

Orwell found that communists and their fellow travellers at the celebration adopted the Marxist position that bourgeois freedoms were illusions, and intellectual honesty was a form of antisocial selfishness: 'Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticise and oppose.

Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

they illustrated an unacknowledged truth about contemporary writing: reporters, editors and artists in Britain, America and most of Europe are not afraid of politicians. They are frightened of Islamists, and do not run cartoons that might offend them. They are frightened of oligarchs and CEOs, and worry about libel and the ability of the wealthy to bend the ear of their proprietors. But they are not frightened about leaking the secrets or criticising the actions of elected governments.

The demand to 'respect' religion is an attempt to push back the gains of the Enlightenment by forbidding the essential arguments that religious toleration allowed.

the reporters wondered whether Assange would endanger Afghans who had helped the Americans if he put their names online. 'Well, they're informants,' he replied. 'So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it.

I feel like a class traitor when I say it but the first lesson from the 'heroic' age of the Left in the Thirties is that it never works like that in a conflict in which your own society is involved. You can be a critical friend of one side or another, a very critical friend as often as not, but you have to choose which side you are on, and those who don't usually end up as the biggest villains of all.

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.

Outsiders don't understand the enfeebling self-consciousness of political debate on the middle-class liberal-left: they can't imagine the thoughts strangled and tongues bitten to avoid giving the smallest offence to audiences overanxious to find it.

Taxpayers loathe bankers not for being capitalists but for being failed capitalists, who picked the public's pockets. If they had been successes, the public would not despise them.

For a generation, Tories have repeated Baroness Thatcher's acid line: "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." After the bailout of the banks, that seems to be the trouble with financial capitalism as well.

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.

Francis Wheen will release Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia

It is not only in academia and on the remnants of the Left that you encounter the argument that to prefer democracy to tyranny in other cultures, or the rights of women to the demands of misogynist clerics, is to announce yourself as insensitive brute or interfering imperialist.

From the mild argument that "America had it coming" to the full fairytale that "America did it", what unites those who spin justifications about the crimes of radical Islam is that they have no sympathy for or interest in the largely Muslim populations of the poor world that it terrorises and oppresses.

Academics, students, readers of and writers for most leftish newspapers and all but the bravest Muslim and poor world intellectuals share this group's defining unwillingness to condemn crimes that can't be blamed on the West.

Boggan got him to translate and heard how hairdressers in Baghdad had to report subversive remarks made by women under the driers. What was a hairdresser to do if her sensibly wary customers steered clear of politics? For how long could she keep telling the secret police that she had nothing to report, without running the risk of the spies marking her down as uncooperative?

Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship.

Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The Left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the 'root cause' of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.

Other US networks that banned images of Muhammad said they were censoring because they were liberals who wanted to display their respect and tolerance. 'No you're not,' Stone said. 'You're afraid of getting blown up. That's what you're afraid of. Comedy Central copped to that, you know: "We're afraid of getting blown up.

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.

Western democracies managed to fight without imposing restrictions on freedom of speech. Instead of Orwell's 'war atmosphere', there was an anti-war atmosphere.