Nick Harkaway Quotes
With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eye blink.
Harkaway, Nick. The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. John Murray, 2012.
Those who wanted to restrict freedom of speech during World War I argued that the popular will could express itself during elections:
The important thing about rights is that they exist independent of majority opinion. The majority might want to trample the rights of an unpopular group or individual. Very often Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but the majority views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists.
This is a typical statement of human rights policy by many countries. Essentially, some controlling authority states that rights are guaranteed except when it is “dangerous” or contrary to the country’s “best interest”. Of course then anything the authorities want to censor is classified so that it is an exception. To be a right, it must be guaranteed even when hateful, insulting and/or dangerous.
During World War II, reporters covering Eisenhower found out where the next allied attack was planned:. Not a word of the operation leaked or was printed.
Nicholas Cornwell (born 1972), better known by his pen name Nick Harkaway, is a British novelist and commentator. He is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, and Gnomon; and a non-fiction study of the digital world, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World.
