23 Quotes by Nick Cohen

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

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

No one is as murderously ‘Islamophobic’ as Islamists are.

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.

By the Eighties socialism was dying even in the poor world, and there was nothing left to do for those who hated the status quo but embrace the programme of the anti-democratic far right, as Foucault had done, or more usually, just refuse to come out against radical reactionary forces on the grounds that any movement that was against the West couldn’t be all bad.

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?

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.

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.