Bari Weiss Quotes

Free speech is carelessly tossed to one side in order to silence views and people that liberals label as intolerant.

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.

It's very worrying at this time in the world that any point of view should be prohibited, that's banned, there are heretics that should be burned at the stake.

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.

I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive.

The poisoning of the civil discourse always accompanies totalitarian movements.

In Pakistan, ideology actually forbids intellectual activity. For instance, there is one section in the penal code which says that if you criticize the ideology of Pakistan, you can be punished for it.

Conservatives put the law before the man. Progressives put the man before the law.

There is social intimidation by the self-appointed brigades of the thought police… they exist in every society, whether they are of the religious, nationalistic or atheistic variety. Dogmatists, who are convinced that they know better, that only the way they think is acceptable and who would deprive others of their right to hear differing and discordant voices.. They try to achieve this by either silencing the author or scaring away the public.

… the politically engaged will tend also to be the most closed-minded.

[…] 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.

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.

Even a liberal city will have a prehistoric homophobe. After a show in Washington State, this guy came up to me and said, 'Your shows was a lot funnier before you started in on your agenda.' I told him, 'Please, please keep people like you from coming to my show. I'm glad you had a bad time.'

Speech is not violence. The Left conflates the two in order to justify its own violent reactions to differing points of view.

We've gotten to a point where you can't be a politician and actually say what you're thinking because someone's gonna get offended, and God forbid, like, everyone's so sensitive now, it's ridiculous.

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.

I think the big problem in America has is being politically correct.

Surely all Americans have the right to give their money only to those causes which they support. But what kind of society has this created? A society where the ignorant reign. A society where enlightened must hold their tongues. A nation whose politicians must profess half-hearted devotion to an ancient fable or face the disastrous consequences of speaking their true mind.

A lot of it is backlash against all this political correctness that's going on.

Our universities are run by leaders who are models of the left-wing ideology that dominates so much of our politics and culture. It deems the rights of certain people less worthy of protection than others; it divides the world into oppressor and oppressed. You can call for the murder of all Jews, but say sex is biological and you will be punished.

The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression - book banning in its many modern forms - is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.

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.

Donald Trump is finding out what I found out: when you run for office, you are not allowed to tell a joke.

Pat Buchanan... was fired by MSNBC for doing nothing more than voicing his rock-solid conservative thoughts on the otherwise failing network... The real message of the left is intolerance, zealotry, bigotry and hate. The left has no use for the First Amendment or the rest of the Constitution unless it fits their multicultural, euro-socialist agenda, which is failing all across Europe and everywhere it is practiced.