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You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom QUOTES

You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom QUOTES

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

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

2 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

3 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

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

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

5 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

6 " 2005 study of British chiropractors found that 77 per cent did not seek informed consent. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

7 " freedom to speak includes the freedom to be wrong. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

8 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

9 " When the political partisan’s beliefs are insulted or ridiculed, he feels the ‘offence’ as deeply as any believer who has heard his god or prophet questioned. We do not, however, prohibit or restrict arguments about politics out of ‘respect’ for political ideologies, because we are a free society. We call societies that prohibit political arguments ‘dictatorships’, and know without needing to be told that the prohibiting is done to protect the ruling elite. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

10 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

11 " 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? "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

12 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

13 " Their information for visitors makes no pretence that the gospels are accurate accounts of Christ’s life and teaching. Cambridge Anglicans stress that unknown hands wrote them long after Christ’s death. They offer worshippers a celebration of tradition, symbolic truths and parables, not literal truths. Everywhere liberal Christians, Jews and Muslims follow the same example. They worship in a narrow religious sphere, which is cautious and a touch vapid, and do not try to force the rest of society to accept their views. For them there is a secular world informed by science, and there is their world of faith. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

14 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

15 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

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

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

17 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

18 " 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. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

19 " Both suspect the white poor. The right regard them as scroungers, who steal the money of the middle classes, either by breaking into their homes or by taking their taxes in benefit cheques. The left regard them as sexist and racist homophobes. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

20 " When the FBI arrested Abdulmutallab, journalists wanted to know why the university had not done more to fight extremism. The response of the university authorities was an education in itself. They denounced the ‘quite disturbing level of Islamophobia’ the case had aroused. Their inquiry decided that Abdulmutallab’s radicalisation had happened after he left university, despite the evidence to the contrary. At a meeting at UCL to discuss the controversy, I watched academics and student leaders abuse the university’s critics. They were the real racists and bigots, not the guests of the Islamic Society. They were the ones who needed ‘de-radicalising’, not the religious reactionaries. "

― , You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom