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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 788374c | If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| b7a0195 | As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as "anticlimax" began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words "The Personal is The Political." At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was - cliche is arguably forgiven here - very bad news. From now on it would be enough to be a member of a sex o.. | leftism leftist the-personal-is-the-political | Christopher Hitchens | |
| e118b7e | Our Christian enthusiasts are evidently too stupid, as well as too insecure, to appreciate this. A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| d90fcc7 | It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Con.. | britain british-empire cold-war conservative-party-uk crisis democracy elections history imperialism power russia soviet-union time truth united-states winston-churchill | Christopher Hitchens | |
| be94e63 | To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, not something you do. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 1339c1b | Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 1501b3d | The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead. First presaged by the rantings of John the Baptist,.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 87bdf4a | If you have ever argued with a religious devotee, for example, you will have noticed that his self-esteem and pride are involved in the dispute and that you are asking him to give up something more than a point in argument. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 7791a15 | Moreover, the context is oppressively confined and local. None of these provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperatives of nomadic subsistence. This is forgivable on the part of the provincial yokels, obviously, but then what of their supreme guide and wrathful tyrant? Perhaps he was made in their image, even if not graven? | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 096b4f6 | And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be. | something | Christopher Hitchens | |
| f9ad091 | Some years ago, after the disappearance of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwirner in Mississippi, some friends of mine were dragging the rivers for their bodies. This one wasn't Schwirner. This one wasn't Goodman. This one wasn't Chaney. Then, as Dave Dennis tells it, "It suddenly struck us--what difference did it make that it wasn't them? What are these bodies doing in the river?" That was nineteen years ago. The questions has.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 1e56bfe | Instead, the polling business gives the patricians an idea of what the mob is thinking, and of how that thinking might be changed or, shall we say, "shaped." It is the essential weapon in the mastery of populism by the elite." | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| ddb1eed | What the above examples reveal is not a man prone to the faux pas, but a gentleman--strictly defined, by Hitchens, as "someone who is never rude except on purpose." A spectacular instance of his gentlemanliness occurred during an appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. Unlike most guests, Hitchens did not try to flatter or pacify the audience. Instead, after being booed and jeered for pointing out the horrors of a nuclear Iran, he ra.. | Windsor Mann | ||
| 38db1d8 | It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of "discrimination." This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same." | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| f174df8 | Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of the praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be of the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!) | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| c9e4101 | I don't seem to have said enough about the compensating or positive element of exposure to travel. Just as you discover that stupidity and cruelty are the same everywhere, you find that the essential elements of humanism are the same everywhere, too. Punjabis in Amritsar and Lahore are equally welcoming and open-minded, even though partition means the amputation of Punjab as well as of the subcontinent. There are a heartening number of athe.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 6cae97a | As long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffuse feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 43c6595 | One of the most idiotic jeers against animal lovers is the one about their preferring critters to people. As a matter of observation, it will be found that people who 'care'--about rain forests or animals, miscarriages of justice or dictatorships-- are, though frequently irritating, very often the same people. Whereas those who love hamburgers and riskless hunting and mink coats are not in the front ranks of Amnesty International. | Windsor Mann | ||
| c67b137 | THERE CAME A TIME many years ago when I decided to agree to the baptism of my firstborn. It was a question of pleasing his mother's family. Nonetheless, I had to endure some teasing from Christian friends--how could the old atheist have sold out so easily? I decided to go deadpan and say, Well, I don't want his infant soul to go to hell or purgatory for want of some holy water. And it was often value for money: The faces of several believer.. | Christopher Hitchens | ||
| 02b5c14 | If you really care about a serious cause or a deep subject, you may have to be prepared to be boring about it." [Letters to a Young Contrarian (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 122]" | Windsor Mann | ||
| def91fc | I mean consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which sometimes meet us of cruelty inflicted on brute animals. For what was this but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord?," John Henry Newman," | Andrew Linzey | ||
| b352ed1 | And this is the sense of the word "grammar" which our inaccurate student detests, and this is the sense of the word which every sensible tutor will maintain. His maxim is "a little, but well"; that is, really know what you say you know: know what you know and what you do not know; get one thing well before you go on to a second; try to ascertain what your words mean; when you read a sentence, picture it before your mind as a whole, take in .. | John Henry Cardinal Newman | ||
| 91458e4 | Mr Kingsley begins then by exclaiming- 'O the chicanery, the wholesale fraud, the vile hypocrisy, the conscience-killing tyranny of Rome! We have not far to seek for an evidence of it. There's Father Newman to wit: one living specimen is worth a hundred dead ones. He, a Priest writing of Priests, tells us that lying is never any harm.' I interpose: 'You are taking a most extraordinary liberty with my name. If I have said this, tell me when .. | humorous satire | John Henry Newman | |
| d548940 | Gilbert: How Clark Gable turn every women's head so? Foolish young English girls would see a movie star in every GI with the same Yankee-doodle voice. Glamour in US privates named Jed, Buck or Chip, with their easy-come-by-gifts and Uncle Sam sweet-talk. Dreamboats in hooligans from Delaware or Arizona with fingernails that still carried soil from home, and eyes that crossed with any attempt at reading. Heart-throbs from men like those in t.. | Andrea Levy | ||
| 67c1250 | If truly tested, how would we react? | Andrea Levy | ||
| ef4f2b1 | There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. | Andrea Levy | ||
| 8bfe7fe | any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but formidable library of the books that, for conventional reasons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 053cf5c | Each reader is but one chapter in the life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it is as if he condemned the book to be buried alive. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| bba82f9 | Ancient Egypt 1300BC Be a scribe! Engrave this in your heart So that your name might live on like theirs! The scroll is better than the carved stone. A man has died: his corpse is dust, And his people have passed from the land. It is a book that makes him be remembered In the mouth of the speaker who reads him. | engraving scribe | Alberto Manguel | |
| 622e758 | Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,is not of the Father, but is of the world." This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the.. | consolation god libraries meaning naturalism world | Alberto Manguel | |
| 0d62f8d | nHn n`rf lmdh nqr' Ht~ `ndm l n`rf kyf nqr' | Alberto manguel | ||
| e4f0d76 | You don't immediately understand something like that, even when it's explained to you clearly. You don't understand it, because you don't know how to understand it. You lack that space in your mind that would let you take it in. You are incapable of believing in the possibility of what they are telling you, because nothing of the sort has ever happened to you before. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 29a6ce4 | dh kn llyl bn "kwws", dhn "lyth" 'w lnsyn hw Hfydh ldhy wld mn ltHd lrhyb byn "llyl" w "ltnfr"." | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 94ec72b | Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be | Alberto Manguel | ||
| dd6acf4 | n lHkm ldykttwryyn ykhfwn lktb 'kthr mn 'y khtr` akhr `l~ lTlq | Alberto manguel | ||
| 8595a2b | Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 491620a | There is nothing," Naude wrote, "that renders a Library more recommendable, than when every man finds in it that which he is looking for and cannot find anywhere else; therefore the perfect motto is, that there exists no book, however bad or badly reviewed, that may not be sought after in some future time by a certain reader." These remarks demand from us an impossibility, since every library is, by needs, an incomplete creation, a work-in-.. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| 4559afc | This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library's borders coincide with those of the world itself. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| c1dffd7 | dh kn lktb mst`mlan 'd` kl lshrt lty dwnt `l~ Hlh... lshr@ lwHyd@ lty 'nDl lzlth mn ktby (wGlb dwn njH ydhkr) hy lSq@ ls`r lty yD`h by'`w lktb lHqwdyn `l~ Zhr lktb, hdhh ldml@ lshyTny@ l tzwl bshwl@, fhy tkhlf ndwb mjdhwm@ wathr mn md@ lzj@ yltS bh lGbr wlzGb b`d ftr@ mn lzmn, tj`lny 'tmn~ lw kn ldy mmsH@ jhnmy@ 'Hkm bh `l~ hw'l ldhyn khtr`w hdhh llSqt. | Alberto Manguel | ||
| a5a17ac | The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me -- me and every other reader -- by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I'll never read. | known-reader readers reading | Alberto Manguel | |
| 5540892 | My library was to me an utterly private space that both enclosed and mirrored me. | library reading | Alberto Manguel | |
| 6b2400b | From the book he carefully tears out several maps, and in this light Afghanistan's mountains and hills and restlessly branching corridors of rock appear as though the pages are crumpled up, and there is a momentary wish in him to smooth them down. Laser-guided bombs are falling onto the pages in his hands, missiles summoned from the Arabian Sea, from American warships that are as long as the Empire State Building is tall. | Nadeem Aslam | ||
| 227890e | I don't feel old. I just feel like someone young who has something wrong with him. | Nadeem Aslam | ||
| 91b9c85 | When a coin is minted, the devil kisses it. | Nadeem Aslam |