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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e916337 | I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as 'Abu Nidal' ('father of struggle'), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat's main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when Abu Nidal asked me if I would like to be trained in one of his camps. No thanks, I explained. From this awkward beginning there was a further decline. I was then asked if I knew Said Hammami, the envoy of the PLO in London. I did in fact know hi.. | arafat china interviews iraq israel london middle-east military-training palestine plo politics said-hammami the-times two-state-solution war | Christopher Hitchens | |
| e01a3c8 | You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too. | guilt politics | Christopher Hitchens | |
| fc3c61f | Many readers are familiar with the spirit and the letter of the definition of "prayer", as given by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil's Dictionary. It runs like this, and is extremely easy to comprehend: Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Everybody can see the joke that is lodged within this entry: The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters .. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 8de3b15 | mass indoctrination of uneducated young men with such ideas is in itself a lethal danger to society and to international order. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 8fec59b | Actually, the "leap of faith"--to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it--is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a "leap" that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the "leap" is.. | confected-proofs evidence faith leap-of-faith miracles religion revelations | Christopher Hitchens | |
| fefa8cf | Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn't analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish betwee.. | new-york september-11-attacks terrorism war war-on-terror washington-dc | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 3ca5bca | Quixote shines from Lorca and Picasso, From Dali and El Greco, | cervantes dali don-quixote el-greco federico-garcia-lorca lorca pablo-picasso picasso quixote salvador-dali view-of-toledo | Dejan Stojanovic | |
| f81ee1e | The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal's champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published.. | arkansas bill-clinton corruption cowardice debate delusion idiocy impeachment-of-bill-clinton leftism lewinsky-scandal liberalism mccarthyism new-left-review sex verso-books witch-hunt | Christopher Hitchens | |
| cca2b67 | Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his mo.. | abu-musab-al-zarqawi al-qaeda al-qaeda-in-iraq arab-spring death death-of-osama-bin-laden exorcism feminism iraq islamism life literature music osama-bin-laden pakistan secularism september-11-attacks sunni-islam terrorism theocracy | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 47fa181 | Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all. How dare you intervene? As well ask, How dare you not? | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 2ee9741 | but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 9249b21 | I'd like to hear your opinion on this piece of Beethoven. And remember, it is not Beethoven who is being examined here. | Paul Strathern | ||
| dcd8df6 | Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury:) "Lion, rifles -- and stupidity." | lions stupidity | Beryl Markham | |
| 0b0d6f8 | Much depends on asking the right question at the right time. | discovery history innovation science | Arthur Koestler | |
| b9f596a | There was a dense fog in my brain,impenetrable to any coherent thought,except the dull obsession of counting the minutes - an aching state of semi concsiousness and numb idiocy. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 68f2f03 | History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 6aee750 | that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in .. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 5adaab7 | That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, muck later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| c78172b | Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth's total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 1bbd752 | How soon human beings forget what a privilege it is to live in freedom. A privilege, not an honor. An honor would mean we deserved it. We do not. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 635064f | The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible. | Walter Kirn | ||
| a7ece84 | Again, Rayford slid to the ground, raising his arms. "My Lord and my God, I am so unworthy." "And you, Rayford, who once were alienated and an enemy in your mind by wicked works, yet now I have reconciled the body of My flesh through death to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in God's sight." | Tim LeHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins | ||
| 066ccbc | The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. | history past present | Shashi Tharoor | |
| 372153f | All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| c7d5809 | lt's an honor and a delight to meet you and a tragedy you're here | Holly Black | ||
| 0617090 | Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones. | Holly Black | ||
| 730ad52 | No, I cannot see myself serving Balekin. | Holly Black | ||
| 454ca88 | I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown./Wind and time are blowing me out." -Maxine Hong Kingston" | Maxine Hong Kingston | ||
| 5ea796f | My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the field and eats food left for the gods. | Maxine Hong Kingston | ||
| 9bf6774 | There is nothing worse than realizing you're about to watch the girl that you've fallen in love with die. | Tracey Garvis-Graves | ||
| b8ebd8a | Don't worry," she says. "They're happy tears. There's nothing I love more than a good happy ending." | Tracey Garvis-Graves | ||
| 3142bb6 | I know you've alluded to my boundary issues," he said, sitting down on the edge of the tub. "And this is probably a shining example, but I wanted to make sure you were okay. Passing out in the bathtub or shower is one of the leading causes of death while bathing. And I can't see anything because of all the bubbles. Actually, that's a blatant lie because I can pretty much make out your entire left nipple. The suds are a little disparate in t.. | Tracey Garvis-Graves | ||
| 98e9dfa | It is revealing of the American culture that its prototypic hero is the cowboy: an uneducated, boorish, Victorian migrant agricultural worker. | Trevanian | ||
| d688496 | Itiraf ruha iyi gelir, Montjean. Ruhu bosaltir, yeni gunahlar icin yer hazirlar. | Trevanian | ||
| afd20d0 | Religion will never show the way. | Irving Stone | ||
| c1634eb | His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him he didn't have any soul and left for the brothel. He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw opportunity here to get rid of it .. | atheism boxing-with-god rust shrapnel soul | Flannery O'Connor | |
| 7def6ab | You might as well go one place as another," he said. "That's all I know." | Flannery O'Connor | ||
| 733b2fd | Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual. | b-a-s-s greenleaf o-henry-memorial | Flannery O'Connor | |
| 4395674 | Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. | writers writing | Flannery O'Connor | |
| f315c7d | My mamma and I have interesting literary discussions like the following which took place over some Modern Library books that I had just ordered: SHE: "Mobby Dick. I've always heard about that." ME: "Mow-by Dick." SHE: "Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called Idiot. What's it about?" ME: "An idiot." | Flannery O'Connor | ||
| 0e4856a | The virtue of hope, in Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust. | Flannery O'Connor | ||
| af60ed3 | sitting with him was like sitting by yourself; he didn't talk except when it suited him. You asked him a question in the morning and he might answer in the afternoon, or he might never. | Flannery O'Connor | ||
| 421f3e2 | It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant. | parenting unconditional-love | Flannery O'Connor | |
| f7c3755 | We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn't have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. That is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do. | Flannery O'Connor |