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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b45434a | If you care about the points of agreement and civility, then, you had better be well-equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you are not then the "center" will be occupied and defined without your having helped to decide it, or determine what and where it is." | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 01bedc9 | Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but... Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)" | death family friends | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 6bcd822 | Seeing the name in a headline last week--a headline about a life that had involved real achievement--I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995--the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy 'experience'--Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly in.. | 1953 1995 2006 2008 asia bill-clinton celebrity edmund-hillary first-lady first-lady-of-the-united-states foreign-policy hillary-clinton jennifer-hanley lies mount-everest nepal new-york politics tenzing-norgay united-states united-states-elections-2008 united-states-senate | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 06192f3 | I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that , in his second novel, , published in 1935, had borrowed from for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading .. | george-orwell influence james-joyce literary-criticism literature trafalgar-square ulysses-novel | Christopher Hitchens | |
| d9ccef5 | There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don't much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish.. | ancestry antisemitism atheism christendom christianity christians civilisation exile fascism honour intermarriages islam israel israeli-palestinian-conflict jerusalem jewish-question law-of-return leo-strauss mosaic-law muslims nuremberg-laws redemption religious-conversions victor-klemperer | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 424adfb | Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life. The disease is pervasive, from the weird obsession with virginity and the one-way birth canal through which prophets are "delivered," through the horror of menstrual blood, all the way to the fascinated disgust with homosexuality and the preten.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 5990b12 | T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 1d904b3 | I, for example, recently finished writing an article about the latest wave of "home-grown" Islamic suicide-murderers. It was impossible not to notice one thing that their profiles and Web sites had in common. All of them complained about the impossibility of finding a woman, or sometimes a woman of sufficient piety. Meanwhile their public propaganda was hot with disgust and indignation at the phenomenon of female inchastity. The connection .. | fanaticism freud piety repression sexual-frustration sigmund-freud terrorists virginity | Christopher Hitchens | |
| c450dab | Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves. Xenophanes | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 1f993c8 | It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book ] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the ques.. | capitalism communism democracy devil god good-and-evil jesus monarchy norman-mailer omnibenevolence omnipotence philosophy politics reincarnation religion theism theology | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 4d7d917 | Consider the great . is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like or the Chicago-based , who object t.. | history huckleberry-finn imperialism mark-twain racism united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 029385b | Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or for.. | candide crime cyprus henry-kissinger naivete self-esteem turkey turkish-invasion-of-cyprus voltaire war-crimes | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2cd7942 | How much vanity must be concealed - not too effectively at that - in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? | vanity | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 90c01f9 | Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It's not that I terribly symp.. | communism dflp dogmatism edward-said humanism liberation middle-east moscow orwell palestine palestinians politics rationality religion religious-extremism soviet-union | Christopher Hitchens | |
| d9ccefd | And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmu.. | camus communism czechoslovakia david-szmulevski east-germany eastern-europe germans history hungary ideology israel jewish-diaspora jews nazis poland red-army revenge secret-police stalin | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 512cc6a | The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them. | elections politics politics-of-the-united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 6efbbea | During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was .. | bosnia bosnian-war city-councils croats david-rieff extremism humour intellectuals islamic-extremism jews muslims religion religious-extremism serbs sontag zealotry zenica | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 1aa703b | The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can't be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus. | corruption politics | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 9163dd5 | I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it's been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia. Near the southernmost city of Kaesong, captured by the North .. | absolutism caprice communism confucianism cruelty farce ideology karl-marx kim-il-sung kim-jong-il korea nationalism north-korea queen-noguk religion tomb-of-king-kongmin totalitarianism veneration-of-the-dead vladimir-lenin xenophobia | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 98a1c54 | Thus in order to be a "radical" one must be open to the possibility that one's own core assumptions are misconceived." -- | false humility radical | Christopher Hitchens | |
| e24bd1c | It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms--like 'Stalinism,' say--just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought t.. | adolf-hitler cults-of-personality death-of-osama-bin-laden evil history islam islamism jihad liberty napoleon osama-bin-laden religion september-11-attacks stalinism terrorism theocracy | Christopher Hitchens | |
| abbb53f | I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the dev.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| df297e8 | So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don't live up to their apparent billing. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 4dcb552 | So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to them. I .. | ba-ath-party ba-athist-iraq bill-clinton crime-family fascism genocide genocide-convention invasion-of-kuwait iraq iraq-war kuwait militarism national-socialism nationalisation nuclear-reactor-technology oil privatisation psychopaths serial-killers stalinism united-nations wmd | Christopher Hitchens | |
| f486b09 | One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, ma.. | arrogance atheism bible biblical-covenant children christianity divine-retribution edith-stein exile false-modesty gentiles grandmothers hellenism hiwi-al-balkhi holocaust jealousy jerusalem jesus judaism martyrdom masochism passover passover-seder punishment rabbis rationalisation religion secularism self-respect six-day-war suffering survivors theodicy war western-wall will-of-god wine | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 9fb703a | Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravada editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service. | religion | Tom Clancy | |
| 8ef8eb8 | One thing about flying that he never got used to was that no matter how awful the weather was on the ground, if you flew high enough you could always find the sun. | optimism | Tom Clancy | |
| 6adfbea | The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man's soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life. | Tom Clancy | ||
| 9e8ea4e | The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. | darkness-at-noon liberty politics soviet-union | Arthur Koestler | |
| 39a5839 | Cigarettes to be fetched for me from the canteen,' said Rubashov. 'Have you got prison vouchers?' 'My money was taken from me on my arrival,' said Rubashov. 'Then you must wait until it has been changed for vouchers.' 'How long will that take in this model establishment of yours?' asked Rubashov. 'You can write a letter of complaint,' said the old man. 'You know quite well that I have neither paper nor pencil,' said Rubashov. 'To buy wri.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| b3b3144 | Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 0da0491 | Love is a powerful painkiller. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 03d5460 | When a human's tears finally dry up forever, they transform into a monster. | Kohta Hirano | ||
| 3a244b6 | No matter how many stones you throw at the water's surface, no matter how much you step on a shadow, the water's surface does not disappear, the shadow does not disappear. | Kohta Hirano | ||
| 078fe25 | Opening lines of The Great Indian Novel narrated as a modern day MahaBharata. They tell me India is an underdeveloped country. They attend seminars, appear on television, even come to see me, creasing their eight-hundred-rupee suits and clutching their moulded plastic briefcases, to announce in tones of infinite understanding that India has yet to develop. Stuff and nonsense, of course. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 7bb9cfb | While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 755304a | Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 0bdb2b8 | I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded. | Maxine Hong Kingston | ||
| be61a30 | It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips - biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.) | reading | Maxine Hong Kingston | |
| 8d1669e | The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms. | Maxine Hong Kingston | ||
| fa432e3 | Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America. | assimiliation culture culture-identity emigrants immigrants | Maxine Hong Kingston | |
| 322ad6b | I've never been so scared in my life. I thought that shark was going to eat you." TJ hugged me, resting his chin on the top of my head. "It didn't though." "We're going to eat him now, aren't we?" I asked. "Oh, hell yes," he said, a big grin on his face." | Tracey Garvis-Graves | ||
| 0bc13ef | You made it so damn easy for me to love you | Tracey Garvis-Graves | ||
| 7056616 | I wonder how many marriages are fractured and damaged beyond repair by complacency rather than any single traumatic event. One day you wake up and realize that the distance between you and your spouse has grown to such an enormous width that neither of you are capable of clearing the distance. No matter how much speed you build up, or how far you can jump, it's just there. Gaping and unforgiving. | Tracey Garvis-Graves |