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788374c
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If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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b7a0195
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As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as "anticlimax" began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words "The Personal is The Political." At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was - cliche is arguably forgiven here - very bad news. From now on it would be enough to be a member of a sex o..
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leftist
the-personal-is-the-political
leftism
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Christopher Hitchens |
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e118b7e
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Our Christian enthusiasts are evidently too stupid, as well as too insecure, to appreciate this. A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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d90fcc7
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It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Con..
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time
history
truth
crisis
british-empire
conservative-party-uk
elections
imperialism
soviet-union
united-states
winston-churchill
power
britain
democracy
russia
cold-war
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Christopher Hitchens |
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be94e63
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To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, not something you do.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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1339c1b
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Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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1501b3d
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The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead. First presaged by the rantings of John the Baptist,..
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Christopher Hitchens |
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87bdf4a
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If you have ever argued with a religious devotee, for example, you will have noticed that his self-esteem and pride are involved in the dispute and that you are asking him to give up something more than a point in argument.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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7791a15
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Moreover, the context is oppressively confined and local. None of these provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperatives of nomadic subsistence. This is forgivable on the part of the provincial yokels, obviously, but then what of their supreme guide and wrathful tyrant? Perhaps he was made in their image, even if not graven?
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Christopher Hitchens |
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096b4f6
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And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.
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something
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Christopher Hitchens |
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f9ad091
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Some years ago, after the disappearance of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwirner in Mississippi, some friends of mine were dragging the rivers for their bodies. This one wasn't Schwirner. This one wasn't Goodman. This one wasn't Chaney. Then, as Dave Dennis tells it, "It suddenly struck us--what difference did it make that it wasn't them? What are these bodies doing in the river?" That was nineteen years ago. The questions has..
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Christopher Hitchens |
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1e56bfe
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Instead, the polling business gives the patricians an idea of what the mob is thinking, and of how that thinking might be changed or, shall we say, "shaped." It is the essential weapon in the mastery of populism by the elite."
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Christopher Hitchens |
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38db1d8
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It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of "discrimination." This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same."
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Christopher Hitchens |
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f174df8
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Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of the praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be of the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!)
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Christopher Hitchens |
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c9e4101
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I don't seem to have said enough about the compensating or positive element of exposure to travel. Just as you discover that stupidity and cruelty are the same everywhere, you find that the essential elements of humanism are the same everywhere, too. Punjabis in Amritsar and Lahore are equally welcoming and open-minded, even though partition means the amputation of Punjab as well as of the subcontinent. There are a heartening number of athe..
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Christopher Hitchens |
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6cae97a
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As long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffuse feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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c67b137
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THERE CAME A TIME many years ago when I decided to agree to the baptism of my firstborn. It was a question of pleasing his mother's family. Nonetheless, I had to endure some teasing from Christian friends--how could the old atheist have sold out so easily? I decided to go deadpan and say, Well, I don't want his infant soul to go to hell or purgatory for want of some holy water. And it was often value for money: The faces of several believer..
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Christopher Hitchens |
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0d2e86d
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From Alan Lightman's intricate 1993 novel Einstein's Dreams; set in Berne in 1905: With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts... and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own... Such is the cost of immortality. No person is..
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Christopher Hitchens |
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763ad14
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Three portraits by Hans Holbein have for generations dictated the imagery of the epoch. The first shows King Henry VIII in all his swollen arrogance and finery. The second gives us Sir Thomas More, the ascetic scholar who seems willing to lay his life on a matter of principle. The third captures King Henry's enforcer Sir Thomas Cromwell, a sallow and saturnine fellow calloused by the exercise of worldly power. The genius of Mantel's prose l..
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Christopher Hitchens |
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65c2ace
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In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing--under the name Matt Lowe--for John Middleton Murry's Adelphi. As he told his diary:
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poverty
writing
politics
tautology
edward-said
george-orwell
economics
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Christopher Hitchens |
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d305861
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Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...), is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban and the Ba'ath Pa..
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farenheit-9-11
michael-moore
pacificism
moral-equivalence
george-orwell
film
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Christopher Hitchens |
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2098572
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There was also the time that competitors were asked to submit a paragraph of a Graham Greene parody: Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and placed third.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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b5ce6ef
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I would put How Green Was My Valley in the same class as Uncle Tom's Cabin: a work that leaves an ineradicable "scratch on the mind," to borrow Harold Isaacs's useful phrase. There was another element as well. At a certain point, on some springy-turfed Welsh hillside far above the scenes of alienation and exploitation that lay below, young Huw contrived to part with his irksome virginity. Richard Llewellyn handled this transition with very ..
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Christopher Hitchens |
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596bc12
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That most risky and volatile of all things—a self-pitying majority.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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8462464
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The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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8d6568f
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Perhaps the values of socialists can only be realized by socialists in a nonsocialist society.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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1ff207c
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Peace through Strength," surely history's most exploded nostrum.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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97cf461
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Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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0c2acce
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Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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5c3dc39
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An old definition of a gentleman: someone who is never rude except on purpose.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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139a1c0
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I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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3ee7bd9
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Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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9512358
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The death toll is not nearly high enough... too many [jihadists] have escaped.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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143f767
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I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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6dfaf7a
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Will an Iraq war make our Al Qaeda problem worse? Not likely.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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d606790
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The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobsters, anal sex and picnics.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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4219caa
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We are not occupying Afghanistan, we are there as guests of a government, at their request.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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691dca8
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Inanity is pretending that Afghanistan will go away if we leave.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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7bb8e66
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To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
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Christopher Hitchens |
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f25b227
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The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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1893da5
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Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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dd0a45e
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In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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d830dfd
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My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.
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Christopher Hitchens |
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ad636c2
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Compulsory bad taste isn't a good cultural sign either.
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Christopher Hitchens |