Roger Ebert Quotes

My view on Democrats is that they're fascists disguised as liberals, or liberal moderates. You're not allowed to say anything they don't agree with. You're not allowed to do anything.

The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Liberals are not always so liberal with people who disapprove - disapprove of their point of view.

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.

By silencing speech, the new Left makes life more dangerous by leaving violence as the only option. Maybe that's what they want.

Liberals always blame the other guy.

The arrogance of the Left always fascinates me.

As a life-long liberal who has engaged in protests against the government and for civil rights, I am saddened at efforts by some of my fellow liberals to silence commencement speakers with whom they might disagree on some issues.

The vast majority of people in academia, especially at the administrative level, have so little confidence in their ability to make an argument for their liberal cause, they choose to keep conservatives from making their own case at all. It's pathetic, cowardly, unconstitutional and completely predictable.

The fatal danger of our times today is a growing intolerance and suppression of both opinions and evidence that differ from the prevailing ideologies that dominate institutions, ranging from the academic world to the corporate world, the media and governmental institutions.

I don't think it's entirely paranoid to suspect that one day, you won't be able to so much as question the primary tenets of anti-racism without going to jail.

There are people who disagree with the left, and that will not be tolerated. People who disagree with them, whether they are high judges, whether they are prosecutors, whether they are average ordinary every day citizens, it will not be tolerated.

There's a lot of people that don't understand liberalism, there are a lot of people that I think, by definition, still need to be informed and educated that it isn't the soft, loving, compassionate stuff that it's portrayed to be. Trump speaks for himself. Who Trump is and what he's doing is not a mystery to anybody. It's the exact opposite of a mystery. It's in your face.

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?

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.

Popular culture, in all its crudeness, is the output of liberals. It is liberalism that for decades has rejected any protest as 'censorship' or 'McCarthyism.'

In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face ... Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and incovenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of iedas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own.

It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.

I don't like the tendency on the part of so many people today to think that those who don't agree with them are bad. In fact, I find that very dangerous.

If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?

I think political correctness really does help us when it serves us but it doesn't help us when it silences us.

The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.

People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think. In fact, one can even get killed for giving me information. I am not the only one in danger. I have examples that prove it.