Search quotes

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
b679947	I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually ..	history religion argentina british-jews expansionism french-jews haifa israelis hebron zionism law-of-return jewish-diaspora gentiles israeli-palestinian-conflict nuclear-weapons united-states atheism fascism antisemitism britain colonialism france israel jews palestine	Christopher Hitchens
711fa7b	Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the r..	racism islamic-banking somalia caliphate death-of-osama-bin-laden nazis theocracy nihilism osama-bin-laden jihad nazism fascism islam	Christopher Hitchens
c099437	The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.	mother-teresa	Christopher Hitchens
6828069	Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still ..		Christopher Hitchens
a508dbb	I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milosevic and Karadzic were from Montenegro an..	karadzic milosevic sun-yat-sen napoleon nationalism	Christopher Hitchens
f04881f	There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflec..	religion	Christopher Hitchens
c98c0d7	As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms ..	enlightenment christianity religion education life assimilation chabad-messianism dialectics haskalah isaiah-berlin menachem-mendel-schneerson messianism moses-mendelssohn prohibitions rebbes rituals rabbis exile monotheism judaism old-testament germans free-thought return study ethics plagiarism prophecy atheism voltaire islam intellect antisemitism thought evil	Christopher Hitchens
c791641	Until you have done something for humanity," wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, "you should be ashamed to die." --		Christopher Hitchens
093856f	What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.	vindication	Christopher Hitchens
83245ec	Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.	friends friendship martin-amis best-friends	Christopher Hitchens
0e16e3a	I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into..	medicine	Christopher Hitchens
919d83d	We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.	life	Christopher Hitchens
c05ceab	So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the or of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an and a and a , who had married to and had a copy of Marilyn's conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in and Annie Navasky's front room..	shakespeare india religion annie-navasky arthur-miller bar-and-bat-mitzvah best-man budapest desecration eritrea marilyn-monroe martin-amis morocco prague religious-conversion robert-goldburg steve-wasserman synagogues tunisia victor-saul-navasky jewish-question david-rieff rabbis temples spinoza normality einstein istanbul security salvation poland jewishness eastern-europe kurdish-people middle-east damascus iraq debate atheism islam antisemitism jews germany	Christopher Hitchens
ef60845	The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.		Christopher Hitchens
0f94304	Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.	writing-advice	Christopher Hitchens
fd2b16b	Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence		Christopher Hitchens
198e1d0	said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.	naturalisation united-states	Christopher Hitchens
84f5b26	Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the..	andalusia ariel-sharon azmi-bishara bosnia-and-herzegovina caliphate chemical-weapons fatah halabja halabja-poison-gas-attack israelis knesset leftists politics-of-israel takbir gaza national-security iran henry-kissinger balkans hamas plo noam-chomsky catholics war-crimes theocracy bosnian-war oil kosovo kosovo-war bill-clinton christians muslims baath-party saddam-hussein nazism edward-said spain imperialism united-states fascism islam islamism propaganda antisemitism fanaticism israel palestinians religious-extremism cia	Christopher Hitchens
babbb62	I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.	worship deification personal-life sadism privacy kim-jong-il north-korea	Christopher Hitchens
9885a9b	Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.	grudges savant-syndrome forgiveness memory	Christopher Hitchens
4241f5c	In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable."	philosophy freethought	Christopher Hitchens
6d2bd54	Cheap booze is a false economy.	wisdom economy value	Christopher Hitchens
345669d	Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors--the living--could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in ad..	suicide war christianity friends sacrifice death religion christian-martyrs conscription kamikaze memorials poppies self-abnegation suicide-attack martyrs masochism orwell november comrades soldiers theocracy ugliness causes martyrdom self-importance patriotism principles fanaticism childhood torture	Christopher Hitchens
384137d	The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.		Christopher Hitchens
7586989	Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.	teasing	Christopher Hitchens
e85218c	Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.	noninterventionism realism	Christopher Hitchens
0308b94	The literal mind is baffled by the ironic one, demanding explanations that only intensify the joke. A vintage example, and one that really did occur, is that of P.G. Wodehouse, captured by accident during the German invasion of France in 1940. Josef Goebbels's propaganda bureaucrats asked him to broadcast on Berlin radio, which he incautiously agreed to do, and his first transmission began: Young men starting out in life often ask me--"How ..		Christopher Hitchens
b6b57af	A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.	friendship	Christopher Hitchens
2625fd8	The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.	totalitarianism tyranny power	Christopher Hitchens
677f7ab	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 w..		Christopher Hitchens
9aec637	it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists		Christopher Hitchens
a9b28d9	Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.	evolution	Christopher Hitchens
4170ff9	In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.		Christopher Hitchens
2b9935e	The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.	dictatorship fascism rules	Christopher Hitchens
87021b7	A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful.		Christopher Hitchens
39a2792	Be ... suspicious ... of all those who employ the term 'we' or 'us' without your permission. This is [a] form of surreptitious conscription ... Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.		Christopher Hitchens
e1e12f7	I don't have a body, I am a body.		Christopher Hitchens
79c64a6	The fragility of love is what is most at stake here--humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed--but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.	humanity love isolation	Christopher Hitchens
36710b6	In a state of conflict or a conflicted state.		Christopher Hitchens
1517686	However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there's one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound... In the brute physical world, and the one encompasse..	philosophy life-challenges	Christopher Hitchens
06041a5	A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.		Christopher Hitchens
459ca41	The one unforgivable sin is to be boring		Christopher Hitchens
58ca392	People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.	freethought	Christopher Hitchens
ec51993	Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.	war	Christopher Hitchens

b679947

I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually ..

history religion argentina british-jews expansionism french-jews haifa israelis hebron zionism law-of-return jewish-diaspora gentiles israeli-palestinian-conflict nuclear-weapons united-states atheism fascism antisemitism britain colonialism france israel jews palestine

Christopher Hitchens

711fa7b

Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the r..

racism islamic-banking somalia caliphate death-of-osama-bin-laden nazis theocracy nihilism osama-bin-laden jihad nazism fascism islam

Christopher Hitchens

c099437

The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.

mother-teresa

Christopher Hitchens

6828069

Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still ..

Christopher Hitchens

a508dbb

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milosevic and Karadzic were from Montenegro an..

karadzic milosevic sun-yat-sen napoleon nationalism

Christopher Hitchens

f04881f

There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflec..

religion

Christopher Hitchens

c98c0d7

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms ..

enlightenment christianity religion education life assimilation chabad-messianism dialectics haskalah isaiah-berlin menachem-mendel-schneerson messianism moses-mendelssohn prohibitions rebbes rituals rabbis exile monotheism judaism old-testament germans free-thought return study ethics plagiarism prophecy atheism voltaire islam intellect antisemitism thought evil

Christopher Hitchens

c791641

Until you have done something for humanity," wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, "you should be ashamed to die." --

Christopher Hitchens

093856f

What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.

vindication

Christopher Hitchens

83245ec

Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.

friends friendship martin-amis best-friends

Christopher Hitchens

0e16e3a

I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into..

medicine

Christopher Hitchens

919d83d

We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.

life

Christopher Hitchens

c05ceab

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the or of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an and a and a , who had married to and had a copy of Marilyn's conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in and Annie Navasky's front room..

shakespeare india religion annie-navasky arthur-miller bar-and-bat-mitzvah best-man budapest desecration eritrea marilyn-monroe martin-amis morocco prague religious-conversion robert-goldburg steve-wasserman synagogues tunisia victor-saul-navasky jewish-question david-rieff rabbis temples spinoza normality einstein istanbul security salvation poland jewishness eastern-europe kurdish-people middle-east damascus iraq debate atheism islam antisemitism jews germany

Christopher Hitchens

ef60845

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

Christopher Hitchens

0f94304

Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

writing-advice

Christopher Hitchens

fd2b16b

Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence

Christopher Hitchens

198e1d0

said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.

naturalisation united-states

Christopher Hitchens

84f5b26

Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the..

andalusia ariel-sharon azmi-bishara bosnia-and-herzegovina caliphate chemical-weapons fatah halabja halabja-poison-gas-attack israelis knesset leftists politics-of-israel takbir gaza national-security iran henry-kissinger balkans hamas plo noam-chomsky catholics war-crimes theocracy bosnian-war oil kosovo kosovo-war bill-clinton christians muslims baath-party saddam-hussein nazism edward-said spain imperialism united-states fascism islam islamism propaganda antisemitism fanaticism israel palestinians religious-extremism cia

Christopher Hitchens

babbb62

I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.

worship deification personal-life sadism privacy kim-jong-il north-korea

Christopher Hitchens

9885a9b

Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.

grudges savant-syndrome forgiveness memory

Christopher Hitchens

4241f5c

In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable."

philosophy freethought

Christopher Hitchens

6d2bd54

Cheap booze is a false economy.

wisdom economy value

Christopher Hitchens

345669d

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors--the living--could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in ad..

suicide war christianity friends sacrifice death religion christian-martyrs conscription kamikaze memorials poppies self-abnegation suicide-attack martyrs masochism orwell november comrades soldiers theocracy ugliness causes martyrdom self-importance patriotism principles fanaticism childhood torture

Christopher Hitchens

384137d

The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.

Christopher Hitchens

7586989

Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.

teasing

Christopher Hitchens

e85218c

Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.

noninterventionism realism

Christopher Hitchens

0308b94

The literal mind is baffled by the ironic one, demanding explanations that only intensify the joke. A vintage example, and one that really did occur, is that of P.G. Wodehouse, captured by accident during the German invasion of France in 1940. Josef Goebbels's propaganda bureaucrats asked him to broadcast on Berlin radio, which he incautiously agreed to do, and his first transmission began: Young men starting out in life often ask me--"How ..

Christopher Hitchens

b6b57af

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

friendship

Christopher Hitchens

2625fd8

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

totalitarianism tyranny power

Christopher Hitchens

677f7ab

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 w..

Christopher Hitchens

9aec637

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

Christopher Hitchens

a9b28d9

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

evolution

Christopher Hitchens

4170ff9

In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.

Christopher Hitchens

2b9935e

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.

dictatorship fascism rules

Christopher Hitchens

87021b7

A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful.

Christopher Hitchens

39a2792

Be ... suspicious ... of all those who employ the term 'we' or 'us' without your permission. This is [a] form of surreptitious conscription ... Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.

Christopher Hitchens

e1e12f7

I don't have a body, I am a body.

Christopher Hitchens

79c64a6

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here--humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed--but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

humanity love isolation

Christopher Hitchens

36710b6

In a state of conflict or a conflicted state.

Christopher Hitchens

1517686

However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there's one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound... In the brute physical world, and the one encompasse..

philosophy life-challenges

Christopher Hitchens

06041a5

A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.

Christopher Hitchens

459ca41

The one unforgivable sin is to be boring

Christopher Hitchens

58ca392

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

freethought

Christopher Hitchens

ec51993

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

war

Christopher Hitchens