A Heretic's Manifesto Quotes

“Spinoza said. ‘Government which attempts to control minds is accounted tyrannical, and it is considered an abuse of sovereignty and a usurpation of the rights of subjects.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

“Have sex online, too, some said. And people did. A survey of 6,654 Brits aged 18 to 59 found that 53 per cent had engaged in virtual sexual activity during the first lockdown in 2020.10 Being friendly to neighbours was out, wanking online was in.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

“when it comes to climate change, we’re not really talking about science. We’re talking about scientism. We’re talking about the use of science to fortify political agendas. We’re talking about the way the technocratic elites now marshal expertise in their fearful moral favour. And we’re talking about the treatment of science, this science at least, as a god for a godless age, whose decrees must be blindly obeyed.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

“This represents more than ‘cancel culture’, more than another cynical effort by the elites to circumscribe what may be said on a particular issue. It represents an overturning of the virtues of the Scientific Revolution itself, and of that central freedom of Enlightenment: the freedom to question authority.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie captures it well. She writes about the ‘cold-blooded grasping’ in certain youthful circles – ‘a hunger to take and take and take, but never give’, ‘a massive sense of entitlement’, ‘an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care’, ‘an astonishing level of self-absorption’, ‘language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence’, ‘a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter, but not in the intimate space of friendship’. And, of course, ‘an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others’.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

“Only by being free to think for ourselves do we become fully human, he said: ‘Our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs.’ To police and shrivel the sphere of public discussion is to frustrate the search for truth itself, Milton said, by ‘hindring and cropping the discovery that might yet be further made both in religious and civill Wisdome’.67 Truth is not something to be bestowed on us from on high – it is something we endeavour to discover ourselves through free thought, free debate and the free exchange of ideas with our fellow human beings. Resisting and challenging the libel that says humanity is a toxic force is the first step towards restoring the liberty and confidence we will need if we are to navigate whatever nature throws at us.”
― Brendan O'Neill, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable