Living With Lies Quotes

“For a generation, Tories have repeated Baroness Thatcher's acid line: "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." After the bailout of the banks, that seems to be the trouble with financial capitalism as well.”
― Nick Cohen, Living With Lies: Nick Cohen in Standpoint

“Yet much of his savings came from closing tax loopholes, which, like eliminating waste or believing door-to-door salesmen, is a strategy that habitually promises more than it delivers.”
― Nick Cohen, Living With Lies: Nick Cohen in Standpoint

“From the mild argument that "America had it coming" to the full fairytale that "America did it", what unites those who spin justifications about the crimes of radical Islam is that they have no sympathy for or interest in the largely Muslim populations of the poor world that it terrorises and oppresses.”
― Nick Cohen, Living With Lies: Nick Cohen in Standpoint

“It is not only in academia and on the remnants of the Left that you encounter the argument that to prefer democracy to tyranny in other cultures, or the rights of women to the demands of misogynist clerics, is to announce yourself as insensitive brute or interfering imperialist.”
― Nick Cohen, Living With Lies: Nick Cohen in Standpoint

“Francis Wheen will release Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia”
― Nick Cohen, Living With Lies: Nick Cohen in Standpoint

“A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen," Hofstadter concluded after surveying the sorry field. "It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him — and in any case, he resists enlightenment. We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”
― Nick Cohen, Living With Lies: Nick Cohen in Standpoint

“The defining characteristic of Islamophobic prejudice is the belief that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and yet here, apparently, is the BBC seconding that motion by arguing that a dramatic examination of terrorism would be offensive to all Muslims.”
― Nick Cohen, Living With Lies: Nick Cohen in Standpoint