Nick Cohen Quotes

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.

— Nick Cohen

“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

“No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.”

— Nick Cohen

“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

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

— Nick Cohen

“At the most basic level of protecting a writer's personal safety, democratic countries offer a further advantage. If you steal hundreds of thousands of documents from the Russian state and put them online, the FSB will try to kill you. Steal American secrets, and the CIA will not.”

— Nick Cohen

“The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.”

— Nick Cohen

“Their phobia was a fear of America and the West and modernity.”

— Nick Cohen

“An Iranian foundation offered the earthly reward of $3 million.”

— Nick Cohen

“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.”

— Nick Cohen

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

— Nick Cohen

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

— Nick Cohen