You Can't Read This Book Quotes

“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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Michel Foucault believed that speech was truly free only when the weak took a risk and used it against the strong: ‘In 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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Beyond the intermingling of their finances and interests, the Western rich and the oligarchic rich share an ideological affinity that is worth worrying about too: they are unshakeable in their belief that they are entitled to their wealth, and have every moral right to resist attempts to reduce it. It never occurs to them that they are lucky; that if they are Western speculators, they are lucky to have lived during a time when the negligent governments of America and Britain failed to regulate finance and allowed them to take incredible risks at no personal cost; that if they are post-communist oligarchs, they were lucky to be in place when the Soviet Union collapsed, and to have the connections and muscle to take control of the old empire’s raw materials. To outsiders their luck seems self-evident. Yet nowhere in the recorded utterances of the plutocracy does one find a glimmer of an understanding that time and chance played a part in their good fortune.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Respect for religion is the opposite of religious tolerance, because it allows the intolerant to impose their will on others.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“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?”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Respect is the enemy of tolerance. The loud calls from the religious for censorship in the name of ‘respect’ reveal the fatuity of modern faith. The religious do not say that they are defending the truth from libellous attack, because in their hearts they know that the truth of the holy books cannot be defended. Instead, like celebrities’ lawyers trying to hide secrets, they threaten the gains made in the struggle for religious toleration by saying that those who ask searching questions of religion must be punished for invading the privacy of the pious.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“The private life of civilized society is built on white lies. Everyone except sociopaths self-censors when talking to friends and strangers. Our relations with others would break down if we did not restrain free speech and treat them with respect. No one, however, should demand respect for public ideas that have the power to oppress others as long as criticism is not a direct incitement to crime. Religious and political ideas are too important to protect with polite deceits, because their adherents can seek to control all aspects of public and private life.
If you believe that Western democracies are the sole or prime source of oppression, then you are wide open to the seduction of fascistic ideologies, because they come from a radical anti-democratic tradition that echoes your own. If you think that Israel or the West is the sole or prime source of conflict in the Middle East, your defences against anti-Semitism are down, and ready to be overrun.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Democracy and freedom of information go together, because if the electorate does not know what has been done in its name, it cannot pass a fair verdict on its rulers. Democracy’s advantage over other systems is that it allows countries to replace rulers without violence. But electorates cannot ‘throw the scoundrels out’ if censorship prevents them from learning that the scoundrels are scoundrels in the first place. The limiting of state corruption, meanwhile, is also an ambition that is beyond conventional politics, because it is a universal human aspiration that everyone who has experienced the insolence of office shares.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Evgeny Morozov, the most bracing critic of modern optimism, emphasizes the anaesthetizing effects of perpetual amusement. People use new means of communication not to engage in political activism, but to find entertainment. The Net is no exception, and has increased the opportunities for the masses to find pleasing diversions to a level that no one had previously imagined possible. In Russia, China, Vietnam and the other formerly puritan communist countries, the decision by the new market-orientated regimes to allow Western-style media to provide high-quality escapism, sport, dating and gossip sites was a smart move that made their control of the masses more effective. In Belarus, Morozov discovered Internet service providers that were offering free downloads of pirated movies and music. The dictatorship ‘could easily put an end to such practices, [but] prefers to look the other way and may even be encouraging them’. Unlike so many who write about the Net, Morozov was brought up in a dictatorship – Belarus, as it happens – and the knowledge that freedom is hard to win explains his impatience with wishful thinking.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Today’s liberals lack the self-confidence to say the same about intellectual freedom, and have become as keen on censorship as conservatives once were... Like homophobic conservatives, who worry that if societies’ taboos go, the promotion of homosexuality will turn young people gay, they (liberals) worry that if the law allows unpalatable views to escape unpunished, hatred will turn to violence. Hence, they support laws against incitement to racial and religious hatred in Britain and across Europe, against Holocaust denial in Germany and Austria, and against Holocaust denial and denial of the Armenian genocide in France. Hence, they enforce speech codes that mandate the punishment of transgressors in the workplace and the universities. Few liberals have the confidence to say that free speech, like sexual freedom, would not create a terrible society, because they do not trust their fellow citizens. They do not realize that most people in modern democracies do not harbour secret fascist fantasies, and that the best way to respond to those who do is to meet their bad arguments with better arguments.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“To be happy means to be free and to be free means to be brave,’ Pericles said in his oration for the Athenian war dead, as he emphasized that ancient ideas of free speech have a notion of courage behind them. Citizens of modern democracies, who are at liberty to talk about politics in whatever manner they please, may find the insistence on bravery puzzling, but if they think about how careful they are to
‘respect’ employers and religious militants they will understand the link.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“There are several forms of suppression available. The use of expensive lawyers to punish critics in libel courts, most notably in Britain, but in France, Brazil and Singapore as well, is an under-explored form of censorship that allows the wealthiest people on the planet to intimidate their opponents. The control by the wealthy of parts of the media is a kind of censorship, if not in the age of the Internet a censorship that is as effective as it once was. The most obvious restriction on freedom of speech, and the one which can cause the most damage to the common good, is so ubiquitous and accepted we do not even call it censorship, or think of tearing off the gag that silences us.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“You mean I should kill the leaders of the opposition?’ ‘I will happily do so, Excellency, if you command it. But that’s not the idea. You need to pick on slights and humiliations that are so small they seem not to be humiliations at all, and punish them with unreasonable ferocity. Random violence creates the necessary conditions for order. A leader of the opposition expects us to arrest him from time to time, but a writer making a veiled criticism of your rule, or a man who grumbles about you in a shop queue, does not. By randomly attacking a few people who speak sedition, we tell many people that the only safe option is to avoid all talk about politics. The aim is to create a state where everyone knows it is best to say nothing, and the bastards shut up.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Argument involves the true respect that comes from treating others as adults who can cope with challenging ideas and expecting them to treat you with a similar courtesy.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“In libel, truth is an absolute defence. If writers and publishers can justify what they say, they may leave the court without punishment. In privacy cases, truth is not a defence but an irrelevance. The law intervenes not because the reports are false, but because they tell too much truth for the subject to cope with, and open him up to mockery, to pain … to disrespect.
Privacy rights allowed the wealthy to suppress criticisms, even though the criticisms were true. They could demand respect, even though they were not respectable.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Humans are social primates, and socialising with the rest of our species requires a fair amount of routine self-censorship and outright lying, which we dignify with names such as ‘tact’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘politeness’.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“If rights are good enough for you, then they are good enough for everyone else.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“Sensible countries should treat banks as if they were hostile foreign powers, and enable, protect and honour those who reveal the threats they pose to wider society.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“The worst aspect of the fear the ayatollahs spread was that Western intellectuals were afraid of admitting that they were afraid. If they had been honest, they would have forced society to confront the fact of censorship. As it was, their silence made the enemies of liberalism stronger.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“The religious do not say that they are defending the truth from libellous attack, because in their hearts they know that the truth of the holy books cannot be defended. Instead, like celebrities’ lawyers trying to hide secrets, they threaten the gains made in the struggle for religious toleration by saying that those who ask searching questions of religion must be punished for invading the privacy of the pious.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“No one, however, should demand respect for public ideas that have the power to oppress others as long as criticism is not a direct incitement to crime. Religious and political ideas are too important to protect with polite deceits, because their adherents can seek to control all aspects of public and private life.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“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.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom