Jock Sturges Quotes

I think that we have strayed into very dangerous territory where people are not allowed to express a negative opinion.

I realized very quickly that the main thing that the left was not in favor of was free speech - that there was an intolerance about different ideas and opinions.

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

Political correctness kills discussion.

The people who whine about Fox News are hypocrites - they say they're totally tolerant, but when they run into someone who doesn't share their assumptions, they say, 'Fox News is evil, and it must be stopped.'

People have tried to corner the market on being offended, corner the market on language and corner the market on opinion. Should I lose my job 'cause I offended somebody? No, of course not. Your life should never be affected by public opinion.

Whether it's people walking off 'The View' when Bill O'Reilly makes a statement about radical Islam or Juan Williams being fired for expressing his opinion, over-reaching political correctness is chipping away at the fundamental American freedoms of speech and expression.

The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion It is an atheist, nihilistic religion - but it is a religion that is obligatory for all.

Political Correctness doesn't change us, it shuts us up.

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh have always argued for a ban on my books.

We have a free society, and the totalitarian states are dungeons. We have totally different methods of population control…. We can’t control people so we have to control what they think.

If printers (publishers) only printed that which everyone liked, there would be very little printed

Saying the “wrong” thing, a purposefully offensive or demonstrably false thing, has become, for the disaffected, a mark of integrity.

Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice.

[…] the underlying problem is the soft progressive totalitarianism that seeks to compel submission to its creed. A powerful cultural establishment, now reinforced by political dominion in Washington, won’t tolerate deviance. Instead of learning to live at peace with the reality of pluralism, the essence of a successful democracy, it demands concordance with all of its ever-changing strictures. It ascribes dissent not to honest disagreement, differing experiences, diverse intellectual traditions or the basic human instinct for autonomy, but to malice and ignorance.

This epidemic of student demands for 'safe places' to protect against threatening words and ideas would make a great science fiction film, but unbelievably, events seem to be outpacing the political imagination.

The silence caused by politicizing speech is deafening.

We all know liberals and Democrats who look down on certain people, and there is such a thing as P.C.

It's time to wake up to the reality that ignoring the genuine concerns of the 'fringe,' until it becomes the majority, is patently ridiculous. That the scapegoating of alternative opinions doesn't work.

Jews have been harmed by the threats to freedom of opinion and debate, the punishments for candor, and the decline in rigorous standards in the academy that have accompanied progressive hegemony, which insists upon the sacrosanct status of affirmative action and other policies favored by the left.

Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn't a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.

Public discourse degenerated. There's no longer a place for intelligent debate at universities, where people just work for degrees and careers. My own experience was how my trade union's lively branch debates dwindled to a few people round cups of coffee. There's a climate of people frightened to say what they think for fear of offending someone.

I can't understand why culture cops try and impose their brand of morality on others.

Liberals love to screech about 'free speech,' but it's pretty clear to most of us that they don't really tolerate any speech but theirs.