Political Correctness Quotes

“Don't ever call me mad, Mycroft. I'm not mad. I'm just ... well, differently moraled, that's all.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
― George Orwell

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
― Gore Vidal

“Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“The truth has become an insult.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“I know that even now, having watched enough television, you probably won't even refer to them as lepers so as to spare their feelings. You probably call them 'parts-dropping-off challenged' or something.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.”
― John Cleese

“Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.”
― Helmut Newton

“The concept of “microaggression” is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be “hate speech,” instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them.”
― Thomas Sowell

“...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional “victims” who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.”
― Gad Saad

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
― Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“If your social consciousness seems stuck in 1975, 2014 is gonna be a rough ride.”
― John Scalzi

“Offence is so easily given. And where the 'minority' issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect.”
― Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door

“Love begets wisdom, thus it is, as often misconceived, more than vain layers of tenderness; it is inherently rational and comprehensive of the problem within the problem: for instance, envy is one of the most excused sins in the media of political correctness. Those you find most attractive, or seem to have it all, are often some of the most insecure at heart, and that is because people assume that they do not need anything but defamation.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.”
― Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door

“If you call yourself an "authoress" on your Facebook profile, you suck at life. You are stupid and your children are ugly. It doesn't matter if you're just trying to be cute and original. You're not. You are about as original as all those other witless twits "writing" the one millionth shitty Fifty Shades clone. Or maybe you're trying to show your 2000 fake Facebook "friends" that you are an empowered feminist who will not stand for sexist terminology. But you're not showing people that you are fighting the good fight, you're showing people that you are a sheep, who's trying just a little too hard to ride the current wave of idiotic political correctness. The word "author" is no more gender-discrimination than the word "person." Do you call yourself a personess? No, of course not, because then you might as well wear a sign around your neck that says, "Hello, I'm a retard.”
― Oliver Markus

“Democracy was supposed to champion freedom of speech, and yet the simple rules of table decorum could clamp down on the rights their forefathers had fought and died for.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“I want people to be allowed to make jokes about, and discuss, anything they want. I don’t think people should be ostracized for doing so.”
― Milo Yiannopoulos, Dangerous

“Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“It is a form of generational narcissism to change texts to suit one's own needs.”
― Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters

“The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.”
― Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

“If anyone rises to power, it's not only because he could, but also because the stars were aligned in his favor. Many with apparent means to take it failed simply because they weren't destined for the honor”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“In the United States and Canada, many young people are currently being raised on the idea of “safe spaces”. Ideas that fall outside of the framework of Political Correctness are seen as so offensive that hearing these ideas is believed to be psychologically damaging. The young generation should therefore get ‘protected’ from these opposing ideas. It is hard to come up with a more effective way to create a generation of idiots. Besides being deeply and intensely indoctrinated with Political Correctness, these young people have an additional tendency to connect Western values and principles to the concept of “white supremacy”. Western values and principles are thus “racist” and Western Civilisation is “oppressive”.”
― Paul Nielsen, How to Debate the Left on Islam

“Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing speech. The day she heard “redneck” on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying “redneck” the last time it would be said.”
― Padgett Powell, Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

“Some libs took offense at my David Broder quip earlier. In my own defense, I was taught in college it's OK to disrespect dead white males.”
― James Taranto

“Humans are antifragile; exposure to discomfort and uncertainty -physical, emotional and intellectual- is necessary.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“While progressives might be able to censor ideas they dislike within left-leaning institutions or professions, a society that gets into the habit of censoring unpopular viewpoints would be just as likely to suppress their own points of view.”
― Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time