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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 61c4800 | Guy Pagett is my secretary, a zealous, painstaking, hardworking fellow, admirable in every respect. I know no one who annoys me more. For a long time I have been racking my brains as to how to get rid of him. But you cannot very well dismiss a secretary because he prefers work to play, likes getting up early in the morning, and has positively no vices. The only amusing thing about the fellow is his face. He has the face of a fourteenth-cent.. | Agatha Christie | ||
| 5b6997a | It was on the fourth day that the stewardess finally urged me up on deck. Under the impression that I should die quicker below, I had steadfastly refused to leave my bunk. She now tempted me with the advent of Madeira. Hope rose in my breast. I could leave the boat and go ashore and be a parlourmaid there. Anything for dry land. | Agatha Christie | ||
| 5be4890 | She was a very good, kind woman. I could not have continued to live in the same house with her, but I did recognize her intrinsic worth. | Agatha Christie | ||
| ec09a4c | The Beddingfeld girl was deep in conversation with the missionary parson, Chichester. Women always flutter round parsons. | Agatha Christie | ||
| 0af13d4 | Suzanne likes thrills, but she hates being uncomfortable. | Agatha Christie | ||
| 4c15b1b | Ah dearest heart if you will but wait I'll become the ideal soulmate nevermore causing you a moment's trouble and I but a mere ectoplasmic bubble swaying above your gorgeous head gruff and garrulous and safely dead. | sour-note-on-a-sweet-ending | Christy Brown | |
| def1c22 | Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| d00abd7 | All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for moment when all will be revealed and when the sheep will be divided from the goats, or whatever other bucolic Bronze-Age desert analogy might seem apt. (In Papua New Guinea, where as in most tropical climes there are no sheep, the Christians use the most valued animal of the locals and refer to the congregation as "swine." Flock, herd: what differ.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 4c1ce1d | You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international s.. | anti-war ba-ath-party baghdad communism democratic-party-united-states george-w-bush invasion-of-kuwait iran-iraq-war iraq iraq-war iraqi-communist-party iraqi-kurdistan kurdish-people kuwait labour-movement leftism middle-east opposition-to-the-iraq-war peace-movement republican-party-united-states saddam-hussein socialism | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 63121c1 | Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him. | interventionism iraq iraq-war saddam-hussein | Christopher Hitchens | |
| c769481 | The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part. | debate delusion iraq-war islam islamic-terrorism jihad preemptive-war preventive-war united-states war war-on-terror | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2cc4db6 | The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. | charm double-standards dwight-d-eisenhower george-w-bush golf hypocrisy statesmanship television terrorism united-states war-on-terror | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 8559b02 | Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astonomy takes the place of astrology. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| dc36301 | A local phrase book, entitled , has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape--Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this--the section 'At the Hospital' has the term ('I have loose .. | famine imperialism kim-il-sung korean-language language north-korea north-korean-famine phrase-books propaganda united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 50be27b | Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still 'eternally' held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82. (The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim.) This makes North Korea the only state in the world with a dead president. What would be the right term for this? A necrocracy? A thanatocracy? A mortocracy? A mausolocracy? Anyway, grimly appropriate for a .. | eternal-president kim-il-sung kim-jong-il korean-people-s-army north-korea politics-of-north-korea workers-party-of-korea | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 3b315a0 | Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch.. | 1953 china curtis-lemay division-of-korea hermit-kingdom japan joseph-stalin kim-il-sung korea korea-under-japanese-rule korean-demilitarized-zone korean-war mao-zedong north-korea pyongyang siberia south-korea world-war-ii | Christopher Hitchens | |
| c3f2d82 | It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 9f3f1d5 | In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased. | atheism jews religion | Christopher Hitchens | |
| fa309e9 | It is certain, that, in every religion, however sublime the verbal definition which it gives of its divinity, many of the votaries, perhaps the greatest number, will still seek the divine favor, not by virtue and good morals, which alone can be acceptable to a perfect being, but either by frivolous observances, by intemperate zeal, by rapturous extasies, or by the belief of mysterious and absurd opinions. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| be87daf | A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richar.. | nixon united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 5acbffc | Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incompr.. | baath-party baathism baathist-iraq baghdad bbc corruption damascus diplomacy george-w-bush gordon-correa invasion-of-kuwait iraq journalism kim-jong-il kuwait libya military-intelligence niger north-korea nuclear-proliferation nuclear-weapons pakistan rogue-states rolf-ekeus saddam-hussein sanctions syria terrorism tony-blair united-nations uranium vatican west-africa western-europe wissam-zahawi | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 9256887 | Kingsley could 'do' the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus shelter (this was very demanding and once led to heart palpitations). To create the hiss and crackle of a wartime radio broadcast delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for him scant problem (a tape of it, indeed, was played at his memorial .. | kingsley-amis | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 04e0a34 | Offered a job as book critic for magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied.. | robert-browning romantic-poetry saul-bellow time-magazine whittaker-chambers wordsworth | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 233f9c5 | Over the course of the last decade, I have become vividly aware of a literally lethal challenge from the sort of people who deal in absolute certainty and believe themselves to be actuated and justified by a supreme authority. To have spent so long learning so relatively little, and then to be menaced in every aspect of my life by people who already know everything, and who have all the information they need... More depressing still, to see.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 424a8cb | Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| d8cfb52 | In some cases--most notably the Christian--one revelation is apparently not sufficient, and needs to be reinforced by successive apparitions, with the promise of a further but ultimate one to come. In other cases, the opposite difficulty occurs and the divine instruction is delivered, only once, and for the final time, to an obscure personage whose lightest word then becomes law. Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly incon.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 8e59f44 | Since religion has proved itself uniquely delinquent on the one subject where moral and ethical authority might be counted as universal and absolute, I think we are entitled to at least three provisional conclusions. The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third .. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 31a88fd | When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish 'atrocity stories.' In his column in the London magazine , George Orwell wrote that, though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that diff.. | antisemitism george-orwell germany holocaust holocaust-denial jewry nazi-germany nazism world-war-ii | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2c222e4 | In the late 1940s, a dystopian novel based on the notorious horrors of 'National Socialism' would probably have been very well-received. But it would have done nothing to shake the complacency of Western intellectuals concerning the system of state terror for which, at the time, so many of them had either a blind spot or a soft spot. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 1feeb32 | Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry. | poetry politics ts-eliot | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 1527041 | For all its outwardly easy Latin charm, Buenos Aires was making me feel sick and upset, so I did take that trip to the great plains where the epics had been written, and I did manage to eat a couple of the famous : the Argentine barbecue fiesta (once summarized by Martin Amis's John Self as 'a sort of triple mixed grill swaddled in steaks') with its slavish propitiation of the sizzling gods of cholesterol. Yet even this was spoiled for m.. | asado dictatorship fascism politics | Christopher Hitchens | |
| b9eccdf | Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry; here in the USA it seemed to be true that if you dared to give things 'your best shot' then the other much-used phrases like 'land of opportunity' would kick in as well. | united-states | Christopher Hitchens | |
| fdcb533 | Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake. | politics power | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 16223c7 | I was to grow used to hearing, around New York, the annoying way in which people would say: 'Edward Said, such a suave and articulate and witty man,' with the unspoken suffix 'for a Palestinian.' It irritated him, too, naturally enough, but in my private opinion it strengthened him in his determination to an ambassador or spokesman for those who lived in camps or under occupation (or both). He almost overdid the ambassadorial aspect if yo.. | bigotry dress edward-said new-york palestinian-national-council palestinians snobbishness | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 2d66c27 | Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 2d8c5b9 | M]ost people, most of the time, prefer to seek approval or security. [...] Nonetheless, there are in all periods who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge the debt or not. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| c8ca592 | It is a tragic and potentially lethal irony that those who most despise science and the method of free inquiry should have been able to pilfer from it and annex its sophisticated products to their sick dreams. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 9ba9ddd | It is supposed to be an axiom of "Western" civilization that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as "order." | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 55da9af | New forms of the artistic register are one of the infallible signs of an authentic moment. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 1efd466 | And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| e4ba136 | PATRIOTIC AND TRIBAL feelings belong to the squalling childhood of the human race, and become no more charming in their senescence. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 29e179c | Did I ever think I might have been wrong? Yes, sometimes and briefly. But never because of the supposed majority against me. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 5a3122f | And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay 'The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.' This rather shallow piece appeared in the magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of , Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald etc etc. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, , Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhatt.. | anti-intellectualism anti-semitism authoritarianism cold-war commentary-magazine communism debate delmore-schwartz dwight-macdonald fundamentalism george-orwell intellectuals james-atlas jeane-kirkpatrick jews leon-trotsky manhattan neoconservativism new-criterion new-york new-york-times norman-podhoretz obscurantism partisan-review patriotism power right-wing-politics ts-eliot | Christopher Hitchens | |
| 997228d | I feel upsettingly denatured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice. | Christopher Hitchens |