It's an ongoing battle between the head and the heart, between snapping back at what seems an annoying remark, to conceding someone might have a point.
Issues surrounding opinions and written insights can be far more serious and complex.
Few epitomise freedom of thought and expression more than author Salman Rushdie, who has lived for decades under a fatwa calling for his death imposed by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 after the publication of The Satanic Verses a year earlier.
There were deadly riots in Muslim countries over the book. Rushdie spent years in hiding, had a US$3m bounty on his head. Three people involved in the publication of the book were attacked, one fatally.
Now Rushdie is recovering after being stabbed several times in a horrific attack at a speaking engagement in New York state.
Free speech that challenges ideas and events in a society tests how tolerant that society is, and a key part of that is coping with offence.
In 1990 Rushdie wrote In Good Faith: "What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
Key attitudes for Rushdie are irreverence and brave provocation. When French magazine Charlie Hebdo was the target of a terror attack he wrote that satire was "a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity ... Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect".
And in The Satanic Verses he wrote that a poet's work was "to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep".
A great writer can shape words in a powerful way that leaves an imprint on at least some people who read them, and novelists and journalists are regular targets of authoritarian regimes.
At a mundane level, free speech is a tangled business. In an era where technology has enabled everyone to comment on anything to everyone else in an amplified way, thoughtful ideas and quick takes can sit next to dangerous misinformation and hate speech.
On social media, what passes for debate often resembles verbal mud-wrestling. Some people just want to fire off some bile. Intolerance can rear its head supposedly in support of tolerant values. Blatantly false information gets injected to confuse and manipulate people. Against this daily aggression, it has become routine for many people to keep their heads below the parapet, or to hide within group-think.
At its worst, the online, individual and community worlds blur and some people seek to force others to bend to their will or are inspired to commit violence on behalf of beliefs, ideologies or in the name of religion.
In the aftermath of the attack on Rushdie, some commentators have observed that since the fatwa - which Iran officially withdrew its support for in 1998 - there has been a rise in self-censorship instead of valuing tolerance in societies.
Observer columnist Kenan Malik wrote in 2018 that The Satanic Verses controversy was an early example of "identity politics". "The argument that it is morally wrong to offend other peoples and cultures has become widely accepted in the three decades since. The fatwa has, in effect, become internalised."
The need to accept differences, handle opposing views, and swap ideas is still there - even if it's hard to cope with in practice.
