Quotes from Nick Cohen

Gita Sahgal, who organised the Asian feminists who protested in defence of Salman Rushdie in Parliament Square in 1989. After her employer, the human-rights group Amnesty International, required her to leave for complaining to the press about its alliances with Islamists, her lawyers secured compensation for her.

Irigaray was my favourite. She denounced Einstein's E = mc2 as a sexist equation which 'privileges the speed of light' over more feminine speeds 'which are vitally necessary to us'. Presumably, light might have appeased her if it had shown its feminine side by slowing down to 30 m.p.h. in built-up areas.)

As the costs of storing and retrieving information have collapsed, sharing expertise ought to be easy. But the cooperative approach based on openness and trust undermines the status of managers, whose wealth depends on the ability to create the impression that they have knowledge that their subordinates cannot be trusted to share.

He heard of the generals Saddam had shot for lowering his prestige by losing battles and the generals Saddam had shot for rivalling his prestige by winning battles.

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.

Citizens exercised parrhesia, which translates as 'all speech', or sometimes 'true speech'.

If managers looked to the inspiration for the technologies they deploy, they would find it comes from a scientific method that has no connection to the cramped, fearful ideologies of the managerial economy. The scientific method insists that researchers must go where the evidence leads, whatever the consequences. Status, salary and position should offer no protection from criticism, because no idea or person is sacred.

Richard Feynman said that the differences between true sciences and the pseudo-sciences – a category that includes the management-speak of the business schools – was that the former try to be honest, while the latter do not.

Anyone who has worked in a hierarchical organisation must have noticed that bravery is rarely on display when a superior enters the room.

anonymous blogger can print a leaked document or run a denunciation of an abuse of power. But if the abuse is to be tackled, then the blogger or the people who have read his or her work must go out and campaign for change in public.

hierarchical cultures of business and the state, where status determines access to information, and criticism is met with punishment. Nearly all of us work in hierarchies. Nearly all of us bite our tongues when we should speak freely. Yet few of the classic or modern texts on freedom of speech discuss freedom of speech at work, even though, as the crash of 2008 showed, self-censorship in the workplace can be as great a threat to national security as foreign enemies are.

readers rarely accept arguments that challenge their interests. Even if they acknowledge at some level that there may be truth in what you say, they will blank out the unwelcome knowledge.

Writers write badly when they have something to hide. Clarity makes their shaky assumptions plain to the readers – and to themselves. By keeping it foggy they save themselves the trouble of spelling out their beliefs and recommendations for the future. For academics, of all people, this is a disreputable way of going about business, but one that has many uses. Obscurantism spared the theorists who emerged from the grave of Marxism the pain of testing dearly held beliefs and prejudices

The celebrity and the totalitarian share a desire to have their faces in every newspaper and on every television screen.

The crash of 2008 ought to have thrown a bucket of cold water over the excited futurologists. Open societies suffered far more than closed regimes. A member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was entitled to wonder why Americans were telling him he must allow free speech when China was booming and the First Amendment had not stopped debt-laden America going through a deep recession.

fundamental flaw of modern capitalism is that businesses promote bombastic people. As Cameron Anderson and Sébastien Brion of the University of California, Berkeley, showed experimentally, 'In conditions where there is any ambiguity in competence and performance (which is common in organisations), overconfident individuals will be perceived as more competent by others, and attain higher levels of status, compared to individuals with more accurate self-perceptions of competence.

newspapers that could see money haemorrhaging from their balance sheets could not afford to accept the costs of taking on the plutocracy's lawyers.

Rabbis, priests and mullahs are, it seems, uniting to restrain free speech, lest any member of their collective flock should have his feelings hurt … The Rushdie affair is showing not just that some Muslims do not understand the merits of free speech. It shows that many Western clerics do not either.

In Britain today friends of mine live like dissidents in a dictatorship. They meet in secret. They vet new arrivals to ensure they are not spies. They are ex-Muslims living in a supposedly free country who fear their enemies will damn them as apostates and kill them. How extraordinary that they must hide their true beliefs from all but intimate friends for fear of the consequences. And how shameful that they have no anti-fascist Left worthy of the name to defend them.

Beyond the worries about direct threats lay the fear that religious groups, bureaucrats, left-wing politicians and newspapers would accuse critics of insensitivity or racism, and that racist groups or websites would confirm the accusation by repeating their critiques.

The most unjustly rewarded executives in the world had wrecked Western economies and shown no willingness to change their ways. Yet it never occurred to the supposedly liberal-left governments of Barack Obama and Gordon Brown to provide incentives to allow employees to speak up and speak truthfully, or to impose penalties on those who stayed silent.

the transgressive had come clean, they would have had to accept that they lampooned the bigotry of Christianity and the wickedness of Western governments because they knew that Christians were not so bigoted and Western leaders were not so wicked that they would retaliate by trying to kill them, while the Islamists they ignored just might.

The editor of a Danish newspaper wonders why comedians, who boast of their willingness to 'transgress boundaries' and 'speak truth to power', will mock Jesus but not Muhammad. He invites Danish cartoonists to satirise the Prophet. Most respond by satirising the editor. It makes no difference. They still have to spend the rest of their lives under police protection.

Rushdie Affair became the Dreyfus Affair of our age because it revealed how, when faced the threat of violence, ordinary political categories collapse.