What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. – Hitchens 3:16
My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.
There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.
Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.
What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
th. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.
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)
It’s like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world.
Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a ‘first generation’ of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.
Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.
To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
Indeed, it’s futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.
it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists
I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator – that’s beyond my conceit.
We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.
The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.
The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it’s better to be blatant than latent.
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearful, partially formed animals with a terror of death and the dark
Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being “not even wrong.” Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.
To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off
A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can’t make old friends.
Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.
[He]said something that made it impossible to continue working for him.[The exact words were]You’re fired.
In a Pyongyang restaurant, don’t ever ask for a doggie bag.
I think that people’s sexual preferences are a legitimate subject for humour, dirty humour if at all possible.
It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.
Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.
Bad habits have brought me this far: why change such a tried-and-true formula?
What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can’t be apolitical. It will come and get you. It’s not that you shouldn’t be neutral. It’s that you won’t be able to stay neutral.
What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.
It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.
Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.
Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.
The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them.
The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can’t be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.
You don’t say ‘they all do it’ unless you know you’ve been doing it too.
Don’t write in to ask whether I would prefer Gingrich to Clinton. Ask, rather, whether Clinton prefers Gingrich to you. Go triangulate yourself.
The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.
I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that ‘issue’ I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.
Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.
The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban’s annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?
There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.
Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of ‘the flock.
It’s probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory
In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).
There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.
Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.
The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.
You don’t so much as become an atheist as find out that’s what you are. There’s no moment of conversion. You don’t suddenly think ‘I don’t believe this anymore.’ You essentially find you don’t believe it.
[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.
The Postmodernists’ tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.
The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.
A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’…
Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday’s.
You should be nicer to him,’ a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. ‘He has no friends.’ This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.
I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don’t introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
Beware what you wish for, unless you have the grace to hope that your luck can be shared.
To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?
If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings, I say, ‘I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
The point of protesting about ‘moral equivalence’ is surely not to blur moral choices on ‘our side’. Is it?
[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
I’m very depressed how in this country you can be told “That’s offensive” as though those two words constitute an argument.
I’ve always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don’t really respect anyone who falls for Camelot.
What if, I never tire of asking, we said ‘Secret Council’ instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly ‘Privy Council’?
Thus in order to be a “radical” one must be open to the possibility that one’s own core assumptions are misconceived.
The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you
To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.
To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.
In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.
I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.
The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.
We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.
Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.
The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.
The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.
And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies—racism, leader worship, superstition—assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists).
[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don’t think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.
Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.
There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.
It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill’s sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.
The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that ‘he may tarry,’ we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.
How ya doin’?’ I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, ‘A bit early to tell.
Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim ‘de omnius dubitandum’ [All is to be doubted].
mass indoctrination of uneducated young men with such ideas is in itself a lethal danger to society and to international order.
[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.
I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.
When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
At a certain point talk about ‘essence’ and ‘oneness’ and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.
[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.
As the many male victims of rape in the regime’s disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only.
The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.
Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.
I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.
Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven’t taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).
Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can’t think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.
How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.
In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.
Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.
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?
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.
When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I’m in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn’t feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.
The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.
I don’t envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.
It’s surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
‘Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age’ was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.
A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.
My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.
Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.
One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.
I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.
Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.
I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.
In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.