“Maybe home is nothing but two arms holding you tight when you’re at your worst.”

“Naturally, I want racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, bullying, bigotry, intolerance of all humankind to end. That’s surely a given amongst all of us. The question is how such a goal and aim is to be achieved. My ultimate objection to political correctness is not that it combines so much of what I have spend a lifetime loathing and opposing: Preachiness, piety, self-righteousness, heresy, hunting, denunciation, shaming, assertion without evidence, accusation, inquisition, censoring - that’s not why I’m incurring the wrath of my fellow Liberals. […] My real objection is that I don’t think political correctness works. […] I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective. And political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking of how effective it might be. I wouldn’t class myself as a classical libertarian but I do relish transgression and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy. Progress is not achieved by preachers and guardians of morality but to paraphrase Yevgeny Zamyatin, ‘by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics’. I may be wrong, I hope to learn this evening, I really do think I may be wrong but I’m prepared to entertain the possibility that political correctness would bring us more tolerance and a better world. But I’m not sure and I’d like this quotation from my hero Bertrand Russel to hover over the evening: 'One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. Let doubt prevail.’”