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A Virgin Can Conceive. A Dead Body Can Walk Again. Your Leprosy Can Be Cured. The Blind Can See. Nonsense. It’s Not Moral To Lie To Children. It’s Not Moral To Lie To Ignorant, Uneducated People And Tell Them That If They Only Would Believe Nonsense, They Can Be Saved. It’s Immoral.

-Christopher Hitchens

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A Virgin Can Conceive.

Christopher Hitchens

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A Virgin Can Conceive. A Dead Body Can Walk Again. Your Leprosy Can Be Cured. The Blind Can See. Nonsense. It’s Not Moral To Lie To Children. It’s Not Moral To Lie To Ignorant, Uneducated People And Tell Them That If They Only Would Believe Nonsense, They Can Be Saved. It’s Immoral.

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To Be In Opposition Is Not To Be A Nihilist.

What Word Or Expression Do You Most Overuse? Re-reading A Collection Of My Stuff, I Was Rather Startled To Find That It Was 'perhaps.

I Was Brought Up In A Very Naval, Military, And Conservative Background. My Father And His Friends Had Very Typical Opinions Of The British Middle Class - Lower-middle Class Actually - After The War. My Father Broke Into The Middle Class By Joining The Navy. I Was The First Member Of My Family Ever To Go To Private School Or Even To University. So, The Armed Forces Had Been Upward Mobility For Him.

She's Got No Charisma Of Any Kind [but] I Can Imagine Her Being Mildly Useful To A Low-rank Porn Director.

The Taming And Domestication Of Religion Is One Of The Unceasing Chores Of Civilization.

You Know, You Can Make A Small Mistake In Language Or Etiquette In Britain, Or You Could When I Was Younger, And Really Be Made To Feel It, And It's The Flick Of A Lash, But It Would Sting, And Especially At School Where There's Not Much Privacy, And So On. You Could, Yes, Undoubtedly Be Made To Feel Crushed.

Here Is My Challenge. Name One Ethical Statement Made, Or One Ethical Action Performed, By A Believer That Could Not Have Been Uttered Or Done By A Nonbeliever. And Here Is My Second Challenge. Can Any Reader Think Of A Wicked Statement Made, Or An Evil Action Performed, Precisely Because Of Religious Faith? The Second Question Is Easy To Answer, Is It Not? The First - I Have Been Asking It For Some Time - Awaits A Convincing Reply. By What Right, Then, Do The Faithful Assume This Irritating Mantle Of Righteousness? They Have As Much To Apologize For As To Explain.

The Rich World Likes And Wishes To Believe That Someone, Somewhere, Is Doing Something For The Third World. For This Reason, It Does Not Inquire Too Closely Into The Motives Or Practices Of Anyone Who Fulfills, However Vicariously, This Mandate.

The Essence Of The Independent Mind Lies Not In What It Thinks, But In How It Thinks.

Authors Who Moan With Praise For Their Editors Always Seem To Reek Slightly Of The Stockholm Syndrome.

Demands That You Believe The Impossible Do Not Lead To Peaceful Outcomes.

The Russians Are Going To Be Expansionist Whether We [usa] Provoke Them To It Or Not. Russians Keep Saying That We're Trying To Encircle Them. In What Sense Does The Independence Of Kosovo, A Land-locked Province, Former Yugoslavia, With No Common Border With Russia, Threaten Russia With Encirclement? This Is Insulting. In What Sense Does The Independence Of Georgia Constitute An Encirclement? What We Are Facing, And We May As Well Give It Its Right Name, Is What I Called It Earlier, A Chauvinistic, Theocratic In Part, Xenophobic Russian Imperialism.

One Of The Many Dreadful Aspects Of The Kennedy 'legacy' Is The Now-unbreakable Grip Of Celebrity Politics, Image-doctoring, Stage Management, And "torch-passing" Rhetoric In General.

There Either Is A God Or There Is Not; There Is A 'design' Or Not.

Only The Force Of American Arms, Or The Extremely Credible Threat Of That Force, Can Bring A Fresh Face To Power.

The Bible May, Indeed Does, Contain A Warrant For Trafficking In Humans, For Ethnic Cleansing, For Slavery, For Bride-price, And For Indiscriminate Massacre, But We Are Not Bound By Any Of It Because It Was Put Together By Crude, Uncultured Human Mammals.

If You Think That The Intifada In France Is About Housing, Go And Try Covering The Story Wearing A Yarmulka .

The Easiest Way To Establish A Dictatorship Is To Claim You Are God's Representative On Earth.

Many More People Are Poor And Sick Because Of The Life Of Mt: Even More Will Be Poor And Sick If Her Example Is Followed. She Was A Fanatic, A Fundamentalist, And A Fraud, And A Church That Officially Protects Those Who Violate The Innocent Has Given Us Another Clear Sign Of Where It Truly Stands On Moral And Ethical Questions.

Ethical Questions

Every Campaign, Garry Wills Once Wrote, "taught Nixon The Same Lesson: Mobilize Resentment Against Those In Power." History Taught The Same To Many Conservative And Reactionary Populist Movements, Whose Real Attitude To Those In Power And Authority Was One Of A Servile, Envious, Vicarious Adoration.

"objective" Means That, In A Confrontation With The Evidence, You Would Be Willing To Change Your Own Mind.

Endless Praise And Adoration, Limitless Abnegation And Abjection Of Self; A Celestial North Korea.

To Remember Friendship Is To Recall Those Conversations That It Seemed A Sin To Break Off

As Is So Often The Case With Pieces That Appear In The 'onion,' I Honestly Could Not Decide Whether This Was A Clever Hoax Or Not - The Arguments Were Almost Exactly As Stupid As The Real Thing.

We Are Unlikely To Cease Making Gods Or Inventing Ceremonies To Please Them For As Long As We Are Afraid Of Death, Or Of The Dark, And For As Long As We persist In Self-centeredness. That Could Be A Lengthy Stretch Of Time.

We Know Of No Spectacle More Ridiculous—or More Contemptible—than That Of The Religious Reactionaries Who Dare To Re-write The History Of Our Republic. Or Who Try To Do So. Is It Possible That, In Their Vanity And Stupidity, They Suppose That They Can Erase The Name Of Thomas Jefferson And Replace It With The Name Of Some Faith-based Mediocrity Whose Name Is Already Obscure? If So, We Cheerfully Resolve To Mock Them, And To Give Them The Lie In Their Teeth.

Teasing Is Very Often A Sign Of Inner Misery.

One Of The Many Problems With The American Left Has Been Its Image As Something Rather Too Solemn, Mirthless, Herbivorous, Dull, Monochrome, Righteous, And Boring.

I Vote And I Do Jury Duty.

People Who Think With Their Epidermis Or Their Genitalia Or Their Clan Are The Problem To Begin With. One Does Not Banish This Specter By Invoking It. If I Would Not Vote Against Someone On The Grounds Of 'race' Or 'gender' Alone, Then By The Exact Same Token I Would Not Cast A Vote In His Or Her Favor For The Identical Reason. Yet See How This Obvious Question Makes Fairly Intelligent People Say The Most Alarmingly Stupid Things.

So Here We Have Found A Means Of A) Alienating Even The Most Flexible And Patient Palestinians; While B) Frustrating The Efforts Of The More Principled And Compromising Israelis; While C) Empowering And Financing Some Of The Creepiest Forces In American And Israeli Society; And D) Heaping Ordure On Our Own Secular Founding Documents. When Will The Justice Department And The Congress And The Supreme Court Become Aware Of This Huge And Rank Offense, Which Is Designed To Bring Us Ever Nearer To Holy War?

I Think The Materialist Conception Of History Is Valid.

I Don't Envy Or Much Respect People Who Are Completely Politicised.

Here Is The Point About Myself And My Co-thinkers. Our Belief Is Not A Belief. Our Principles Are Not A Faith. We Do Not Hold Our Convictions Dogmatically. We Believe With Certainty That An Ethical Life Can Be Lived Without Religion. And We Know For A Fact That The Corollary Holds True - That Religion Has Caused Innumerate 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.

It Is Exactly The Fear Of Revenge That Motivates The Deepest Crimes, From The Killing Of The Enemy's Children Lest They Grow Up To Play Their Own Part, To The Erasure Of The Enemy's Graveyards And Holy Places So That His Hated Name Can Be Forgotten.

To Be Against Rationalization Is Not The Same As To Be Opposed To Reasoning.

It Is A Pity That...the Majority Of Feminists And Their Allies Have Stuck To The Dead Ground Of "me Decade" Possessive Individualism, An Ideology That Has More In Common Than It Admits With The Prehistoric Right, Which It Claims To Oppose But Has In Fact Encouraged.

There Can Be No Progress Without Head-on Confrontation.

The Obsession With Gold, Actually And Politically, Occurs Among Those Who Regard Economics As A Branch Of Morality. Gold Is Solid, Gold Is Durable, Gold Is Rare, Gold Is Even (in Certain Very Peculiar Circumstances) Convertible. To Believe In Thrift, Solidity And Soundness Is To Believe In Some Way In The Properties Of Gold.

Many Writers, Especially Male Ones, Have Told Us That It Is The Decease Of The Father Which Opens The Prospect Of One's Own End, And Affords An Unobstructed View Of The Undug But Awaiting Grave That Says 'you're Next.' Unfilial As This May Seem, That Was Not At All So In My Own Case. It Was Only When I Watched Alexander [my Own Son] Being Born That I Knew At Once That My Own Funeral Director Had Very Suddenly, But Quite Unmistakably, Stepped Onto The Stage. I Was Surprised By How Calmly I Took This, But Also By How Reluctant I Was To Mention It To My Male Contemporaries.

I Have A Strong Constitution Which Has Served Me Quite Well, Though If I Hadn't Had Such A Strong One I Might Have Led A More Healthy Life Perhaps.

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.

I'm Not Afraid Of Being Dead, That's To Say There's Nothing To Be Afraid Of. I Won't Know I'm Dead, Would Be My Strong Conviction. And If I Find That I'm Alive In Any Way At All, That'll Be A Pleasant Surprise. I Quite Like Surprises.

But You'll Notice, You Will Notice That Russia And China, Invariably At The United Nations, Move To Block American Action, To Repress Or Hem In Or Punish Other Kinds Of Outlaw. Who Stands Behind Mugabi At The United Nations? Russia And China Do. Who Tried Successfully To Prevent The United Nations From Speaking With One Voice On Its Most Signal Violation Of Its Resolutions, Iraq? Russia And China, Again. North Korea The Same. Burma The Same.

Friends Call Me Hitch. Maybe It Can Be Turned Into A 900-phone Number. People Would Pay To Talk To Me.

There Are Days When I Miss My Old Convictions As If They Were An Amputated Limb. But In General I Feel Better, And No Less Radical, And You Will Feel Better Too, I Guarantee, Once You Leave Hold Of The Doctrinaire And Allow Your Chainless Mind To Do Its Own Thinking.

People Until I Was 60 Would Always Say They Thought I Looked Younger, Which I Think, Without Flattering Myself, I Did, But I Think I Certainly Have, As George Orwell Says People Do After A Certain Age, The Face They Deserve.

I Could Be Spending Time Looking Through A Telescope Or Into A Microscope And Finding Out The Most Extraordinary, Wonderful Things, But People Say Faith Can Move Mountains. Faith In What, By The Way? You Haven't Said.

It [defending Salmon Rushdie] Was, If I Can Phrase It Like This, A Matter Of Everything I Hated Versus Everything I Loved. In The Hate Column: Dictatorship, Religion, Stupidity, Demagogy, Censorship, Bullying And Intimidation. In The Love Column: Literature, Irony, Humor, The Individual And The Defense Of Free Expression.

One Has Children In The Expectation Of Dying Before Them. In Fact, You Want To Make Damn Sure You Die Before Them, Just As You Plant A Tree Or Build A House Knowing, Hoping That It Will Outlive You. That's How The Human Species Has Done As Well As It Has.

Haven't We All Heard Some Irritating Person Saying That If So-and-so Is Elected, Then He/she Is Absolutely Definitely Leaving The Country? There Must Be Some Reason Why It Is Mainly Liberals Who Tend To Say This, But The Chief Thing To Note About The Promise Is That It Is Usually An Empty One.

Along With Islam And Christianity, Judaism Does Insist That Some Turgid And Contradictory And Sometimes Evil And Mad Texts, Obviously Written By Fairly Unexceptional Humans, Are In Fact The Word Of God. I Think That The Indispensable Condition Of Any Intellectual Liberty Is The Realisation That There Is No Such Thing.

Religion Is Compulsory In English Schools, You Know.

Ruthless And Arrogant Though Power Can Appear, It Is Only Ever Held By Mere Mammals Who Excrete And Yearn, And Who Suffer From Insomnia And Insecurity. These Mammals Are Also Necessarily Vain In The extreme, And Often Wish To Be Liked Almost As Much As They Desire To Be Feared.

Redemption Is Promised At The Low Price Of Surrender Of Your Critical Faculties.

It Especially Annoys Me When Racists Are Accused Of 'discrimination.' The Ability To Discriminate Is A Precious Faculty; By Judging All Members On One 'race' To Be The Same, The Racist Precisely Shows Himself Incapable Of Discrimination.

The Concept Of Loneliness And Exile And Self-sufficiency Continually Bucks Me Up.

The Politicized Sponsors Of This Pseudoscientific Nonsense Should Be Ashamed To Live, Let Alone Die. If You Want To Take Part In The “war” Against Cancer, And Other Terrible Maladies, Too, Then Join The Battle Against Their Lethal Stupidity.

In My Life, The Only Certainty Is To Be Uncertain. I'm An Unbeliever Who Believes In Skepticism. I'm Only Sure About Being Unsure.

Thanks To The Telescope And The Microscope, Religion No Longer Offers An Explanation For Anything Important.

Do Not Imagine That You Can Escape Judgment If You Rob People With A False Prospectus Rather Than With A Knife.

In Ridiculing A Pathetic Human Fallacy, Which Seeks Explanation Where None Need Be Sought And Which Multiplies Unnecessary Assumptions, One Should Not Mimic Primitive Ontology In Order To Challenge It. Better To Dispose Of The Needless Assumption Altogether. This Holds True For Everything From Noah's Flood To The Holocaust.

I Make Preparations Both To Live And To Die Every Day, But With The Emphasis On Not Dying, And On Acting As If I Was Going To Carry On Living.

If You've Led A Rather Bohemian And Rackety Life, As I Have, It's Precisely The Cancer That You'd Expect To Get. That's A Bit Of A Yawn.

It Is A Horrible Idea That There Is Somebody Who Owns Us, Who Makes Us, Who Supervises Us - Waking And Sleeping - Who Knows Our Thoughts, Who Can Convict Us Of Thought Crime, Thought Crime, Just For What We Think, Who Can Judge Us While We Sleep For Things That Might Occur To Us In Our Dreams, Who Can Create Us Sick, As Apparently We Are - And Then Order Us, On Pain Of Eternal Torture To Be Well Again. To Demand This, To Wish This To Be True Is To Wish To Live As An Abject Slave.

I Wrote A Piece From North Korea Called Visit To A Small Planet Which Is A Line I Stole From A Play Of Gore Vidal's, Because It Did Seem To Me As If I Had Left This Planet Completely To Go On This Visit To The Northern Part Of The Korean Peninsula, And It Was As If Coming Back From Another Spatial Body Altogether.

As I've Said Before, You Can Be An Atheist And Anything You Like.

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.

No, Nothing Is Sacred. And Even If There Were To Be Something Called Sacred, We Mere Primates Wouldn't Be Able To Decide Which Book Or Which Idol Or Which City Was The Truly Holy One. Thus, The Only Thing That Should Be Upheld At All Costs And Without Qualification Is The Right Of Free Expression, Because If That Goes, Then So Do All Other Claims Of Right As Well.

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.

The Brilliant Schiller Was Wrong In His Joan Of Arc When He Said Against Stupidity The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain. It Is Actually By Means Of The Gods That We Make Our Stupidity And Gullibility Into Something Ineffable.

In One Way, Traveling Has Narrowed My Mind. What I Have Discovered Is Something Very Ordinary And Unexciting, Which Is That Humans Are The Same Everywhere And That The Degree Of Variation Between Members Of Our Species Is Very Slight. This Is Of Course An Encouraging Finding; It Helps Arm You Against News Programs Back Home That Show Seething Or Abject Masses Of Either Fanatical Or Torpid People. In Another Way It Is A Depressing Finding; The Sorts Of Things That Make People Quarrel And Make Them Stupid Are The Same Everywhere.

Name One Moral Action Performed By A Believer That Could Not Have Been Done By A Nonbeliever.

The Quality You Most Admire In A Woman? Courage Moral And Physical: "anima"-the Ability To Visualize The Mind And Need Of A Man. Also A Sense Of The Absurd.

Evelyn Waugh Was In Error When He Said That In New York There Was A Neurosis In The Air Which The Inhabitants Mistook For Energy. There Was, Rather, A Tensile Excitement In The Air Which Made One Think - Made Me Think For Many Years - That Time Spent Asleep In New York Was Somehow Time Wasted. Whether This Thought Has Lengthened Or Shortened My Life I Shall Never Know, But It Has Certainly Colored It.

The Only Position That Leaves Me With No Cognitive Dissonance Is Atheism. It Is Not A Creed. Death Is Certain, Replacing Both The Siren-song Of Paradise And The Dread Of Hell. Life On This Earth, With All Its Mystery And Beauty And Pain, Is Then To Be Lived Far More Intensely: We Stumble And Get Up, We Are Sad, Confident, Insecure, Feel Loneliness And Joy And Love. There Is Nothing More; But I Want Nothing More.

The Faithful Believe That Certain Truths Have Been 'revealed.' The Skeptics And Secularists Believe That Truth Is Only To Be Sought By Free Inquiry And Trial And Error. Only One Of Those Positions Is Dogmatic.

Solidarity Is An Attitude Of Resistance, I Suppose, Or It Should Be.

Quite Interesting, North Korea Is As If It's An Entirely Secular Dictatorship. In North Korea You Might Think That Was The Case Since It Has An Officially Communistic Ideology, But It's Not, It's The Most Religious State It's Possible To Imagine. It's Actually Two People Who Have Been Fused Into One, Maybe This Is Reminding You Of Something, There's The Father And There's The Son. It's One Short Of A Trinity.

The Atheist Proposition Is The Following - Most Of The Time - It May Not Be Said That There Is No God; It May Be Said That There Is No Reason To Think That There Is One.

Jesus Is Santa Claus For Adults.

What A Country, And What A Culture, When The Liberals Cry Before They Are Hurt, And The Reactionaries Pose As Brave Nonconformists, While The Radicals Make A Fetish Of Their Own Jokey Irrelevance.

Who Are Your Favourite Heroines In Real Life? The Women Of Afghanistan, Iraq, And Iran Who Risk Their Lives And Their Beauty To Defy The Foulness Of Theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali And Azar Nafisi As Their Ideal Feminine Model.

If I'm In A Political Argument, I Think I Can, With Reasonable Accuracy And Without Boasting, Put The Other Person's Side Of The Case At Least As Well As They Could. One Has To Be Able To Say That In Any Well-conducted Argument.

Mockery Of Religion Is One Of The Most Essential Things... One Of The Beginnings Of Human Emancipation Is The Ability To Laugh At Authority.

The Beauty Of Science Hugely Outranks The Charms Of Superstition.

Avoid Stock Expressions (like The Plague, As William Safire Used To Say) And Repetitions. Don't Say That As A Boy Your Grandmother Used To Read To You, Unless At That Stage Of Her Life She Really Was A Boy, In Which Case You Have Probably Thrown Away A Better Intro. If Something Is Worth Hearing Or Listening To, It's Very Probably Worth Reading. So, This Above All: Find Your Own Voice.

Take The Risk Of Thinking For Yourself

Greatest Atheist

There Are Also People Who Say It's God's Curse On Me That I Should Have It Near My Throat Because That Was The Organ Of Blasphemy Which I Used For So Many Years. I've Used Many Other Organs To Blaspheme As Well If It Comes To That.

If I Was To Interrupt This Article Every Few Sentences, Asking You Whether Or Not I Was Making A Good Impression On You, I Hope And Believe That You Would Think I Was A Servile Jerk. Yet This Is What Our Politicians Are Doing In Every Speech.

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 Learned That Very Often The Most Intolerant And Narrow-minded People Are The Ones Who Congratulate Themselves On Their Tolerance And Open-mindedness.

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.

Take The Risk Of Thinking For Yourself. Much More Happiness, Truth, Beauty And Wisdom Will Come To You That Way.

The Postmodernists' Tyranny Wears People Down By Boredom And Semi-literate Prose.

Only The Aspirants For President Are Fool Enough To Believe What They Read In The Newspapers.

Talking, It Seemed To Me, Was The Point Of Adult Existence.

I Felt Clinton Represented The Worst Of The 1960s.

An Old Joke Has An Oxford Professor Meeting An American Former Graduate Student And Asking Him What He's Working On These Days. 'my Thesis Is On The Survival Of The Class System In The United States.' 'oh Really, That's Interesting: One Didn't Think There Was A Class System In The United States.' 'nobody Does. That's How It Survives.

The Great Thing About The United States And The Historically Magnetic Effect It Has Had On A Lot Of People Like Me Is Its Generosity, To Put It Simply.

Religion Is Not The Belief There Is A God. Religion Is The Belief God Tells You What To Do.

The Violence In The Bible Is Appalling.

I Say 'merry Christmas' To People I Don't Know, Or To People I Know Are Christians. I Say 'happy Hanukkah' To People I Know To Be Or Suspect To Be Jewish. And I Don't Say 'happy Kwanzaa,' Because I Think African Americans Get Enough Insults All Year Round.

Merry Christmas

I Burned The Candle At Both Ends And It Often Gave A Lovely Light.

Primate And Elephant And Even Pig Societies Show Considerable Evidence Of Care For Others, Parent-child Bonding, Solidarity In The Face Of Danger, And So On.

Exceptional Claims, Require Exceptional Evidence.

Not Many People Come Through Esophageal Cancer And Live To Talk About It, Or Not For Long.

People Know When They Are Being Lied To, They Know When Their Rulers Are Absurd, They Know They Do Not Love Their Chains.

There Is A Limit To The Success Of Conservative Populism And The Exploitation Of "little Guy" Or "silent Majority" Rhetoric, And It Is Very Often Reached Because Of The Emaciated, Corrupted Personalities Of The Demagogues Themselves.

As Well As Being A Vulgar Producer Of Her Own Spectacle, And An Embarrassment To Her Family, Cindy Sheehan Is At Best A Shifty Fantasist.

And When I Was Young, My Family Was Perfectly Nice. I Write A Lot About It, As You Noticed. But It Was Rather Limited. I Think, I Don't Think Anyone In My Family Would Really Feel I'd Done Them An Injustice By Saying That. We Didn't See Many People. There Were Many Books. It Was As If I Wanted To Get Away From Home.

It's Called Faith Because It's Not Knowledge.

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.

There Are People Who Cannot Forget, As Neither Do I, The Lesson Of The Years Of The Indochina War. Which Was, First, That The State Is Capable Of Being A Murderer. A Mass Murderer, And A Conspirator And A Liar.

A Celebrity Is Well Known For Being Well Known. I'm Relatively Well Known - But For What I've Written And Said, Or So I Fondly Imagine.

I Am Not Even An Atheist So Much As I Am An Antitheist; I Not Only Maintain That All Religions Are Versions Of The Same Untruth, But I Hold That The Influence Of Churches, And The Effect Of Religious Belief Is Positively Harmful. Reviewing The False Claims Of Religion, I Do Not Wish, As Some Sentimental Materialists Affect To Wish, That They Were True. I Do Not Envy Believers Their Faith. I Am Relieved To Think That The Whole Story Is A Sinister Fairy Tale; Life Would Be Miserable If What The Faithful Affirmed Was Actually The Case.

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.

I Don't Think Romney Is Wacky At All, But Religion Makes Intelligent People Say And Do Wacky Things, Believe And Affirm Crazy Things. Left On His Own, Romney Would Never Have Said Something Like The Garden Of Eden Was In Missouri, And Will Be Again.

[concerning Monotheistic Religions] The Only Thing These Hysterical Cults Have In Common Is The Belief That This World Will Be Consumed, And Deservedly So, When The Moment Is Ripe. They Also, All Of Them, Profess A Great Disdain For Earthly Possessions. Yet They Pass The Intervening Time In Haggling Over The Most Trivial And Paltry Property Rights, Over Caves And Rocks And Disputable Pieces Of Archeological Rubbish.

With Modern American Dentistry It Is Simply Amazing To See What Transformation Can Be Wrought In A Single Day.

I Don’t Have A Body, I Am A Body.

There Is No Reason At All Why There Aren't Enough People To Guard New Orleans And To Help Stabilise Baghdad.

In A Pyongyang Restaurant, Don't Ever Ask For A Doggie Bag.

[e]xceptional Claims Demand Exceptional Evidence.

I Could Not Possibly Improve On The Sentiment, But I Don't Think It Ought To Depend On The Current Austerities. Isn't Christmas A Moral And Aesthetic Nightmare Whether Or Not The Days Are Prosperous?

One Must State It Plainly. Religion Comes From The Period Of Human Pre-history Where Nobody - Not Even The Mighty Democritus Who Concluded That All Matter Was Made From Atoms - Had The Smallest Idea What Was Going On.

Anyone Who Can Look Me In The Eye And Say They Prefer The Story Of Moses Or Jesus Or Mohammed To The Life Of Socrates Is Intellectually Defective.

It Was An Axiom Of "containment" That No Part Of The Known World Could Be Considered Neutral. "neutralism" Was Among The Cold Warriors' Gravest Curse Words, Applied With Caustic Hostility To India And Even France. Those Who Were Not With Were Against, Subjected To Intense Economic And Ideological And Sometimes Military Pressure To Fall Into Line.

The Secular Argument, Or The Liberal Argument, Is To As Much As Possible Remove Taboos So Things Do Not Become Unmentionable; To Let Some Air Into The Discussion.

I Can't Find The Compulsory Mutilation Of The Genitals Of Children A Subject For Humor... It's Designed To Repress Sexual Pleasure... The Full Excision, Not Just The Snip But The Full Mandatory Covenant Is Fantastically Painful, Leads To Trauma, Leads To The Dulling Of The Sexual Relationship. And Can Be, In Itself Life-threatening At That Moment. We Have Records, I Can Show Them To You, Of Hundreds And Hundreds And Hundreds In The United States Of Boy Babies Who Died Or Had Life-threatening Infections As A Result Of This Disgusting Practice.

It's Often A Bad Sign When People Defend Themselves Against Charges Which Haven't Been Made.

I've Been Writing A Lot About A New Form Of Russian Imperialism. Actually, Russian Orthodox Imperialism. It's Very Little Remarked That The Cement, The Political, Ideological Cement Of The Russian Regime Now, Communism Having Collapsed And Imploded, Is Increasingly A Confessional One.

Pakistan Has To Export A Lot Of Uneducated People, Many Of Whom Have Become Infected With The Most Barbaric Reactionary Ideas.

The Noble Title Of "dissident" Must Be Earned Rather Than Claimed; It Connotes Sacrifice And Risk Rather Than Mere Disagreement.

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 Heretics Or Witches - Hunted Down And Burned.

I Leave It To The Faithful To Burn Each Other's Churches And Mosques And Synagogues, Which They Can Be Always Relied Upon To Do

I Have Often Thought That When I Do Die It Will Be Of Sheer Boredom.

We Have No Proof That Socrates Ever Existed. We Only Know From Witnesses To His Life That He Did. Like Jesus, He Never Wrote Anything Down. It Doesn't Matter To Me Whether He Did Or Not Exist Because We Have His Teachings, His Method Of Thinking, And His Extreme Intellectual And Moral Courage.

So There's Nothing More Vulgar Than The Sound Of Someone Saying, God Bless America, Someone Who Doesn't Really Believe It, But He Thinks It Will Make Him Look Good To Other People. I Think It's The Most Nauseating Spectacle.

The People Who Must Never Have Power Are The Humorless. To Impossible Certainties Of Rectitude They Ally Tedium And Uniformity

To Terrify Children With The Image Of Hell, To Consider Women An Inferior Creation - Is That Good For The World?

The Amazing Fact Is That America Is Founded On A Document. It's A Work In Progress. It Can Be Tested By Each Generation.

I, For One, Will Not Have [the Vietcong] Insulted By Any Comparison To The Forces Of Zarqawi, The Fedayeen Saddam, And The Criminal Underworld Now Arrayed Against Us. These Depraved Elements Are The Iraqi Khmer Rouge.

I'd Always Somehow Felt Slightly As If I'd Been Born In The Wrong Country.

There Is No Such Thing As Closure, And It Wouldn't Be Worth Having If It Were Available, Because All It Would Mean Is That Something That Was Quite An Important Part Of You Had Gone Numb.

I Must Have Been One Of The Least Surprised People On Earth On September 11. I Felt Very Braced For That. I Knew Something Like That Was Going To Come.

My Father Had Died, And Very Swiftly, Too, Of Cancer Of The Esophagus. He Was 79. I Am 61. In Whatever Kind Of A 'race' Life May Be, I Have Very Abruptly Become A Finalist.

I Don't Even Like Showing My Stuff To Publishers And Editors Much.

As The Cleansing Ocean Closes Over Bin Laden's Carcass, May The Earth Lie Lightly On The Countless Graves Of Those He Sentenced Without Compunction To Be Burned Alive Or Dismembered In The Street.

Religion Looks Forward To The Destruction Of The World.... Perhaps Half Aware That Its Unsupported Arguments Are Not Entirely Persuasive, And Perhaps Uneasy About Its Own Greedy Accumulation Of Temporal Power And Wealth, Religion Has Never Ceased To Proclaim The Apocalypse And The Day Of Judgment.

At Oxford One Was Positively Encouraged To Take Wine During Tutorials. The Tongue Must Be Untied.

Why Do Humans Exist? A Major Part Of The Answer: Because Pikaia Gracilens Survived The Burgess Decimation.

No Moral Person Would Do Such A Thing Unless They Thought It Was Divinely Warranted.

Billy Graham Is A Boring, Racist Charlatan.

Mt [mother Teresa] Was Not A Friend Of The Poor. She Was A Friend Of Poverty. She Said That Suffering Was A Gift From God. She Spent Her Life Opposing The Only Known Cure For Poverty, Which Is The Empowerment Of Women And The Emancipation Of Them From A Livestock Version Of Compulsory Reproduction.

The Offer Of Certainty, The Offer Of Complete Security, The Offer Of An Impermeable Faith That Can’t Give Way, Is An Offer Of Something Not Worth Having. I Want To Live My Life Taking The Risk All The Time That I Don’t Know Anything Like Enough Yet; That I Haven’t Understood Enough; That I Can’t Know Enough; That I’m Always Hungrily Operating On The Margins Of A Potentially Great Harvest Of Future Knowledge And Wisdom. I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way.

Everybody Does Have A Book In Them, But In Most Cases That's Where It Should Stay.

Those Who Had Alleged That A Million Civilians Were Dying From Sanctions Were Willing, Nay Eager, To Keep Those Same Murderous Sanctions If It Meant Preserving Saddam!

In Our Time, The Symbol Of State Intrusion Into The Private Life Is The Mandatory Urine Test.

Did We Not Aid The Grisly Taliban To Achieve And Hold Power? Yes Indeed 'we' Did. Well, Does That Not Double Or Triple Our Responsibility To Remove Them From Power?

It [obama's Nobel Peace Prize] Would Be Like Giving Someone An Oscar In The Hope That It Would Encourage Them To Make A Decent Motion Picture.

[even If The U.s. Doesn't Attack] Saddam Hussein Is Not Going To Survive. His Regime Is On The Verge Of Implosion.

I Say That Homosexuality Is Not Just A Form Of Sex, It's A Form Of Love, And It Deserves Our Respect For That Reason.

Here We Are Then, I Was Thinking, In A War To The Finish Between Everything I Love And Everything I Hate. Fine. We Will Win And They Will Lose. A Pity That We Let Them Pick The Time And Place Of The Challenge, But We Can And We Will Make Up For That.

I Have Been Taunting The Reaper Into Taking A Free Scythe In My Direction And Have Now Succumbed To Something So Predictable And Banal That It Bores Even Me.

Happiness Is Fleeting And Life Is Brief, But We Know That, Nonetheless, Life Can Be Savored And That Happiness, Even Of The Ecstatic Kind, Is Available To Us.

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.

A Virgin Can Conceive. A Dead Body Can Walk Again. Your Leprosy Can Be Cured. The Blind Can See. Nonsense. It’s Not Moral To Lie To Children. It’s Not Moral To Lie To Ignorant, Uneducated People And Tell Them That If They Only Would Believe Nonsense, They Can Be Saved. It’s Immoral.

In One Was, I Suppose, I Have Been "in Denial" For Some Time, Knowingly Burning The Candle At Both Ends And Finding That It Often Gives A Lovely Light. But For Precisely This Reason, I Can't See Myself Smiting My Brow With Shock Or Hear Myself Whining About How It's All So Unfair: I Have Been Taunting The Reaper Into Taking A Free Scythe In My Direction And Have Now Succumbed To Something So Predictable And Banal That It Bores Even Me.

A Great Voice Has Fallen Silent. A Great Heart Has Stopped.

Beautiful Sentences Pop Into My Head. Beautiful Sentences That Aren't Always Absolutely Accurate. Then, I Have To Choose Between The Beautiful Sentence And Being Absolutely Accurate. It Can Be A Difficult Choice.

Difficult Choices

The Most Educated Person In The World Now Has To Admit-- I Shall Not Say Confess-- That He Or She Knows Less And Less But At Least Knows Less And Less About More And More.

This Walking Business Is Overrated: I Mastered The Art Of Doing It When I Was Quite Small, And In Any Case, What Are Taxis For?

Our Belief Is Not A Belief. Our Principles Are Not A Faith. We Do Not Rely Soley Upon Science And Reason, Because These Are Necessary Rather Than Sufficient Factors, But We Distrust Anything That Contradicts Science Or Outrages Reason. We May Differ On Many Things, But What We Respect Is Free Inquiry, Openmindedness, And The Pursuit Of Ideas For Their Own Sake.

The Worst Days Are When You Feel Foggy In The Head - Chemo-brain They Call It. It's Awful Because You Feel Boring. As Well As Bored. And Stupid. And Resigned.

Cluster Bombs Are Perhaps Not Good In Themselves, But When They Are Dropped On Identifiable Concentrations Of Taliban Troops, They Do Have A Heartening Effect.

When I Am At Home, I Never Go Near The Synagogue Unless, Say, There Is A Bar Or Bat Mitzvah Involving The Children Of Friends. But When I Am Traveling, In A Country Where Jewish Life Is Scarce Or Endangered, I Often Make A Visit To The Shul.

For The People Who Ostensibly Wish Me Well Or Are Worried About My Immortal Soul, I Say I Take It Kindly.

Millions Of People Die Every Day. Everyone's Got To Go Sometime.

Reagan Is Doing To The Country What He Can No Longer Do To His Wife.

The Moment Of Near Despair Is Quite Often The Moment That Precedes Courage.

If I Convert It's Because It's Better That A Believer Dies Than That An Atheist Does.

I Think That There Is No Supernatural Dimension. The Natural World Is Quite Wonderful Enough. The More We Know About It, The Much More Wonderful It Is Than Any Supernatural Proposition.

I Think The Cultural Task Is To Separate Our Impulses And Needs And Desires From The Supernatural And, Above All, From The Superstitious.

I Have Not Been Able To Discover Whether There Exists A Precise French Equivalent For The Common Anglo-american Expression 'killing Time.' It's A Very Crass And Breezy Expression, When You Ponder It For A Moment, Considering That Time, After All, Is Killing Us.

Whenever I Hear Some Bigmouth In Washington Or The Christian Heartland Banging On About The Evils Of Sodomy Or Whatever, I Mentally Enter His Name In My Notebook And Contentedly Set My Watch. Sooner Rather Than Later, He Will Be Discovered Down On His Weary And Well-worn Old Knees In Some Dreary Motel Or Latrine, With An Expired Visa Card, Having Tried To Pay Well Over The Odds To Be Peed Upon By Some Apache Transvestite.

Arguments That Explain Everything... Explain Nothing

Margaret Thatcher Has Shown That There Is Power And Dignity To Be Won By Defying The Status Quo And The Majority Rather Than By Adapting To Them. If The British Left, Which She Froze Into Immobility Like Medusa, Could Bring Itself To Learn From This, Then We Might Not Have To Look Upon Her Like Again.

I Became A Journalist Because I Didn't Want To Have To Rely On The Press For Information... I Only Read It To Make Sure Of Whatever Everyone Else Thinks Is Going On, Because It's Useful To Know What People Think Is The News.

Writing Is What's Important To Me, And Anything That Helps Me Do That - Or Enhances And Prolongs And Deepens And Sometimes Intensifies Argument And Conversation - Is Worth It To Me. [it Is] Impossible For Me To Imagine Having My Life Without Going To Those Parties, Without Having Those Late Nights, Without That Second Bottle.

My Favorite Time In The Cycles Of Public Life Is The Time When The Pope Is Dead And They Haven't Elected A New One. There's No One In The World Who Is Infallible For Those Weeks. And You Know, I Don't Miss It.

Plainly, This Unwillingness To Give Ground Even On Unimportant Disagreements Is The Symptom Of Some Deepseated Insecurity, As Was My One-time Fondness For Making Teasing Remarks (which I Amended When I Read Anthony Powell's Matter-of-fact Observation That Teasing Is An Unfailing Sign Of Misery Within) And As Is My Very Pronounced Impatience. The Struggle, Therefore, Is To Try And Cultivate The Virtuous Side Of These Shortcomings: To Be A Genial Host While Only Slightly Whiffled, For Example, Or To Be Witty At The Expense Of One's Own Weaknesses Instead Of Those Of Other People.

[today's Left] Would Have Left Us With Slobodan Milosevic In Power, Bosnia Ethnically Cleansed, Kosovo Part Of Greater Serbia, Afghanistan Under The Taliban, And Iraq The Property Of A Psychopathic Crime Family. Now, I'm Sorry To Say, I've No Patience With That Leftist Mentality Anymore.

The Fact Is: It's True What They Say About The United States. It Is A Land Of Opportunity. It Is Too Various To Get Bored With It.

A Bit Of A Stomach Give A Chap A Position In Society.

It Would Have Been Very Alarming - Morally, And In Other Ways Too - If An Attack Of That Nature, The 11 September Attacks, Had Not Aroused In Us And In Our Governments And Societies The Spirit Of Self-defence. If That Had Not Been One Of The Responses It Seems To Me There Would Have Been Very Grave Cause For Concern.

What Do You Most Value In Your Friends? Their Continued Existence.

Alcohol Makes Other People Less Tedious, And Food Less Bland, And Can Help Provide What The Greeks Called Entheos, Or The Slight Buzz Of Inspiration When Reading Or Writing Visiting Today's Iran, I Was Delighted To Find That Citizens Made A Point Of Defying The Clerical Ban On Booze, Keeping It In Their Homes For Visitors Even If They Didn't Particularly Take To It Themselves, And Bootlegging It With Great Brio And Ingenuity. These Small Revolutions Affirm The Human.

I Don't Regard Myself As Any Kind Of Conservative, Except Conceivably Neo, And That Word, Of Course, Is A Ridiculous Appellation, Because It's Used To Describe A Group That Was Ready To Make War On The Status Quo, Which Is Not A Conservative Position.

You Can Only Have One Aim Per Debate.

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