Nick Cohen Quotes

Nick Cohen serves up blunt, witty critiques of media and politics that pull back the curtain on power games.

12 quotes

  1. Former lefties can make a good living in the media by attacking their ex-comrades - I'd do it myself if the price was right.

  2. A little piece of Aldershot in Andalucia.

  3. He has-and there's no point being prissy about this-pinned a large target sign on this country. What he can't or won't do is ask for concessions in return which might offend Jesse Helms.

  4. Maryam Namazie personifies the gulf between liberal apologists and those who really want equality.

  5. London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

  6. No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.

  7. Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

  8. The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz.

  9. Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.

  10. “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.”

  11. “Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.”

  12. “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.”