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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 94ccbff | If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race.. | intermarriage jews mothers nationality race religion religious-conversions rhetorical-questions | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 059fa50 | In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limi.. | bosnia bosnian-war bullets causes churchill death john-burns martyrdom mortars near-death-experience sarajevo siege-of-sarajevo war | Christopher Hitchens | |
| ecfb25c | I certainly didn't concur with Edward on everything, but I was damned if I would hear him abused without saying a word. And I think this may be worth setting down, because there are other allegiances that can be stress-tested in comparable ways. It used to be a slight hallmark of being English or British that one didn't make a big thing out of patriotic allegiance, and was indeed brimful of sarcastic and critical remarks about the old count.. | britain britishness camus edward-said family friendship jewishness loyalty patriotism | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 37b4864 | There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all. | andy-warhol celebrity notoriety united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 038377a | Incidentally, I have also learned a bit about the importance of avoiding feminine embarrassment ('Daddy,' wrote Sophia when she enrolled at the New School where I teach, 'people will ask "why is old Christopher Hitchens kissing that girl?"') and shall now cease and desist." | fatherhood fathers-and-daughters kisses parenthood the-new-school women | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 6e9a0be | An astrologer of a London tabloid was once fired by means of a letter from his editor which began, "As you will no doubt have foreseen.")" -- | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| df37048 | In his book , written in 1951-2 and published in the West in 1953, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz paid Orwell one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another. Milosz had seen the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe from the inside, as a cultural official. He wrote, of his fellow-sufferers: | communism czeslaw-milosz george-orwell nineteen-eighty-four russia totalitarianism | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 73d1633 | The suspicion that a calamity might also be a punishment is further useful in that it allows an infinity of speculation. After New Orleans, which suffered from a lethal combination of being built below sea level and neglected by the Bush administration, I learned from a senior rabbi in Israel that it was revenge for the evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, and from the mayor of New Orleans (who had not performed his own job wi.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 7722a4d | In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides. --HEINRICH HEINE, GEDANKEN UND EINFALLE | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| b34b769 | Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East. | middle-east oil oil-reserves petroleum petroleum-politics politics | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 9fae599 | There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, . Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. 'Land of Contrasts' was our shorthand for it. ('Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.' 'South Africa: a harmony in black and white.' 'Belfast, where ancient meets modern.'.. | antiwar-movement apartheid kosovo kosovo-war pacifism racism slobodan-milosevic south-africa war war-in-afghanistan-2001-present | Christopher Hitchens | |
| d0844a3 | In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States. | capital-punishment capital-punishment-in-the-us social-class united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 18fa726 | One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants.. | dissent politics rebellion strength wisdom | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 7d6818e | The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation but the wrong culprit. Human sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus "miracles" attested to, and scapegoats--such as Jews or witches--hunted down and burned." | religion | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 7e8a364 | A saving grace of the human condition (if I may phrase it like that) is a sense of humor. Many writers and witnesses, guessing the connection between sexual repression and religious fervor, have managed to rescue themselves and others from its deadly grip by the exercise of wit. And much of religion is so laughable on its face that writers from Voltaire to Bertrand Russell to Chapman Cohen have had great fun at its expense. In our own day, .. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 3c2f4bf | In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to "encourage a hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago." This wish for a return to the era of philosophy would put Jefferson in the same period as Titus Lucretius Carus, thanks to whose six-volume poem De Rerum Naturum (On the Nature of Things) we have a distillation of the work of the first true materialists: Leucippus, Democritus, and Epic.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| f9f4eed | Believing then ... that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one's natural pessimism by stoicism and the refusal of illusion, while embellishing the scene with any one of the following. There are the beauties of science and the extraordinary marvels of nature. There is the consolation and irony of philosophy. There are the infinite splendors of literature and poetry, not excluding the liturgical and devotional aspects of thes.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 364698b | To all those who I do not know, and who live in the worlds where superstition and barbarism are still dominant, and into whose hands I hope this little book may fall, I offer the modest encouragement of an older wisdom. It is in fact this, and not any arrogant preaching that come to us out of the whirlwind: "Die stimme der vernunft ist leise". Yes, The voice of reason is very soft, but it is very persistent. In this, and in the lives and m.. | inspirational resistance | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2c297a3 | The United States makes large claims for itself, among them the claim that the nation is the model for a society based simultaneously on democracy and multiethnicity. It's certainly no exaggeration to say that on the success or failure of this principle much else depends. But there must be better ways of affirming it than by clinging to an insipid parody of a two-party system that counts as a virtue the ability to escape thorny questions an.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 581d144 | For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a 'misfiring of something useful', it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive. | religion scientific-naturalism | Karen Armstrong | |
| be5a33f | There should be philosophy and knowledge for the elect, religion and sentimentality for the masses | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 5dfaa21 | Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries--"without counting India"? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinatio.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 94f1065 | If anyone's interested in the alleviation of poverty... | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| fb47ebc | The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn't precisely one of the things that engages you, often at first without your noticing it. 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 or obvious remark would b.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 1c1d870 | It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was 'a war without end.' I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian person.. | authoritarianism bertold-brecht islamism nihilism osama-bin-laden superstition totalitarianism war war-in-afghanistan-2001 war-on-terror | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2305eee | It was well said--by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think--that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable. | torture waterboarding | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 82cdefe | It is possible for music to be labeled "Christian" and be terrible music. It could lack creativity and inspiration. The lyrics could be recycled cliches. That "Christian" band could actually be giving Jesus a bad name because they aren't a great band. It is possible for a movie to be a "Christian" movie and to be a terrible movie. It may actually desecrate the art form in its quality and storytelling and craft." | inspirational music | Rob Bell | |
| 83990d9 | For Jesus, the question wasn't, "How do I get into heaven?" but "How do I bring heaven here?" | Rob Bell | ||
| dcd7186 | Nerves are God's gift to you, reminding you that your life is not passing you by, Make friend with the butterflies. Welcome them when they come, revel in them, enjoy them, and if they go away, | Rob Bell | ||
| 59b5c1a | Pain has a way of making us more honest. | Rob Bell | ||
| 33a926a | Living movements do not come of committees, nor are great ideas worked out through the post, even though it had been the penny post. | John Henry Newman | ||
| 44b228b | A Song) There sat a Lady all on the ground, Rays of the morning circled her round, Save thee, and hail to thee, Gracious and Fair, In the chill twilight what wouldst thou there? 'Here I sit desolate,' sweetly said she, 'Though I'm a queen, and my name is Marie: Robbers have rifled my garden and store, Foes they have stolen my heir from my bower. 'They said they could keep Him far better than I, In a palace all His, planted deep a.. | mary queen | John Henry Newman | |
| 74b4062 | the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way, the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history this act preserves. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 16a6bf2 | The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space. | library | Alberto Manguel | |
| ca9dfc3 | l tHtj lmktb@ ky tkwn nf`@ 'n tqr' bmjmw`h, dh 'n kl qry yntf` mn ltwzn lmnsb byn lm`rf@ w ljhl, ltdhkr w lnsn. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 98d083c | Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, .. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| c518d37 | We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man's experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can .. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 040af63 | Alexandria and its scholars [...] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| fd3a87f | Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God's creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 5a319e8 | I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 9642254 | It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that surrounds us, and storing them for future readers. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 72f926b | Modesty and decency dwell in the mind, not in a burka. | Nadeem Aslam | ||
| 313b406 | He would drift through the house in search of the coolest spot to read through the long summer afternoons that had a touch of eternity to them, altering the arrangement of his limbs as much for comfort as for the fear that his undisturbed shadow would leave a stain on the wall. | Nadeem Aslam | ||
| 054e7c0 | Ze herinnert het zich nog goed, ze fietste naar huis en ze dacht: ik ben eenzaam. Ze belde Roland en hij zei: 'Dat is heel naar voor je, maar op lange termijn is het niet slecht. Eenzaamheid is de voorwaarde voor ware productiviteit. Je moet ervan leren te genieten, net als van gember. | Arnon Grunberg |