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Free speech dies when the populace grows complacent and takes its liberties for granted.
Free speech does not belong to anyone; it is a universal precept and a core human right. If it has come to be perceived as a specifically right-wing concern, this merely goes to show that those of other political persuasions have failed to uphold it.
Tribal allegiances are blinding people to the long-term effects of corporate hegemony.
If we are seeking moral stewardship, Silicon Valley seems an unlikely place to find it.
Defending free speech means defending the rights of those whose speech we despise. Uncontroversial ideas require no such protection.
To assume that defending another’s right to speech is a form of approval of its substance is a grave error
once liberty is relinquished, it is difficult to recover.
There is no contradiction in holding individuals in contempt for their repugnant views and simultaneously defending their right to express them.
do not protect controversial speech for its content, but rather the principle it represents.
speech is integral to the human spirit and hardly comparable with guns, knives and poison.
Cancel culture does not seek to criticise, but to punish, and leaves little scope for redemption.
when speech is met with threats, censorship, defamation, harassment, intimidation, violence or police investigation that freedom becomes compromised. These are the tools of cancel culture.
‘Lived experience’ is what we used to call ‘anecdotal evidence’, a fallacious form of reasoning that has misled many into believing that ours is an essentially oppressive society, overrun by fascists and undergirded by white supremacy.
The notion that an individual’s privilege can be reasonably quantified and allotted into some kind of hierarchy is essentially unsound.
An overdiagnostic culture has reframed distress and emotional pain as forms of mental illness, rather than aspects of a healthy human existence. To feel upset is not an aberration; it is a sign that we are alive.
to make the leap from the natural revulsion we experience at certain alternative worldviews to actively silencing them is to surrender to the authoritarian tendency.
Article 19 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’
‘if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you’. George Orwell,
