Bob Beckel Quotes

I think people are frightened of saying what they think, and I think that's a bad thing for society.

American colleges are now increasingly reflexive in maintaining politically correct dialogue over controversy, and some say universities have lost sight of education's ultimate purpose.

Professors who hold unpopular positions or state inconvenient facts are now considered psychologically toxic.

The P.C. police are out in force at all times... We've reached a point where people are actually afraid to talk about what they want to say.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

Society needs a couple of vents that say what you're not supposed to say.

We've reached a point where people are actually afraid to talk about what they want to say, because somebody might be offended. We've got to get over this sensitivity and it keeps people from saying what they really believe.

The goal of higher education should be to champion the airing of all honest viewpoints. Nothing less is acceptable.

I don't accept the argument of people like David Horowitz that the government should impose some sort of predetermined political balance on academic research.

We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.

By giving in to protesters, colleges are denying the majority of students their right to hear controversial opinions and drawing their own conclusions about those opinions.

Brown’s core value of promoting the free and open exchange of ideas is bedrock to our capacity to fulfill our mission as a university. This value applies not only when ideas are agreeable and aligned with our own. Protecting the right to free expression and promoting open discourse is even more essential when ideas are divergent, abhorrent or even hurtful.

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 'inability to have a dialogue' is increasingly the norm in academia. Conservative thought is not just unwelcome, oftentimes it is banished altogether.

I will withhold federal funding from universities that shut down debate and can't stand different points of view.

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.

A society in which people feel they have a legitimate right to stop someone expressing their views on campus simply because they are unfashionable or unpopular is rather chilling.

You have to understand that the I.D.W. emerged as a response to a world where perfectly reasonable intellectuals were being regularly mislabeled by activists, institutions, and mainstream journalists with every career-ending epithet from 'Islamophobe' to 'Nazi.'

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.

I've been no-platformed from every university with a strong Islamic faith community.

Bastions of free-flowing discussion with civil exchange are the academic ideal. But during my time in academia, it became increasingly clear that prisons of political correctness with peer-engendered public shaming are now the academic reality.

The only threat is a growing pushback from militant liberals who seek to destroy free expression as they look to limit the speech of anyone who has feelings they find objectionable. It makes comics tentative to push boundaries and freely talk about the thoughts in their heads. That part is terrible for development.

The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.

I believe America went wrong in terms of respecting the First Amendment, the state of free speech on American college campuses and on the media and in academia.

Let’s be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can’t be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America’s campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who’re supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression?