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Benito Mussolini Had Barely Seized Power In Italy Before The Vatican Made An Official Treaty With Him, Known As The Lateran Pact Of 1929. Under The Terms Of This Deal, Catholicism Became The Only Recognized Religion In Italy, With Monopoly Powers Over Matters Such As Birth, Marriage, Death, And Education, And In Return Urged Its Followers To Vote For Mussolini's Party. Pope Pius Xi Described Ii Duce (“the Leader”) As “a Man Sent By Providence.”

-Christopher Hitchens

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Benito Mussolini Had Barely

Christopher Hitchens

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Benito Mussolini Had Barely Seized Power In Italy Before The Vatican Made An Official Treaty With Him, Known As The Lateran Pact Of 1929. Under The Terms Of This Deal, Catholicism Became The Only Recognized Religion In Italy, With Monopoly Powers Over Matters Such As Birth, Marriage, Death, And Education, And In Return Urged Its Followers To Vote For Mussolini's Party. Pope Pius Xi Described Ii Duce (“the Leader”) As “a Man Sent By Providence.”

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Terrible Things

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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.

If People I've Never Met Or Don't Know Say That What I've Written Or Done Or Said Means Anything To Them, Then I'm Happy To Take It At Face Value, For Once. It Cheers Me Up.

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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.

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

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.

What If I Pulled Through And The Pious Faction Contentedly Claimed That Their Prayers Had Been Answered? That Would Somehow Be Irritating.

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.

Terrorism Works Better As A Tactic For Dictatorships, Or For Would-be Dictators, Than For Revolutionaries .

American Author Mark Twain, While Viewed As Liberal And Non-judgmental, Did At Times Demonstrate Both These Characteristics. While His Reasons For Detesting The Christian Faith Are Unclear, They Seem To Have Been Profound And Deep-rooted. Having Lambasted The Founder Of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, In A Later Quote He Referred To The Book Of Mormon As "chloroform In Print."

Some People Say That Without God, People Would Give Themselves Permission To Do Anything. [yet] Only With God, Only With The View That God's On Your Side, Can People Give Themselves Permission To Do Things That Otherwise Would Be Called Satanic.

Exceptional Claims, Require Exceptional Evidence.

In Modern Greek History, There Is A Close Relationship Between National Humiliation And Political Radicalization.

We Owe A Huge Debt To Galileo For Emancipating Us All From The Stupid Belief In An Earth-centered Or Man-centered (let Alone God-centered) System. He Quite Literally Taught Us Our Place And Allowed Us To Go On To Make Extraordinary Advances In Knowledge.

What Can Be Asserted Without Evidence Can Be Dismissed Without Evidence.

I Don't Think Souls Or Bodies Can Be Changed By Incantation. Or Anything Else By The Way.

In One Way, 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.

Skepticism Rather Than Credulity Is The Highest Principle That The Human Intellect Can Use To Ennoble Our Existence.

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

All This Could Be Part Of A Plan. There Is No Way An Atheist Can Prove It’s Not. But It’s Some Plan, Isn't It? With Mass Destruction, Pitiless Extermination, Annihilation Going On All The Time. And All Of This Set In Motion On A Scale That’s Absolutely Beyond Our Imagination, In Order That The Pope Can Tell People Not To Jerk Off.

Mass Destruction

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.

There's Been Some Research In Cognitive Science, I'm Told, That Discloses That There Have Always Been Perhaps 10 To 15 Percent Of People Who Are, As Pascal Puts It, So Made That They Cannot Believe. To Us, When People Talk About Faith, It's White Noise.

The Beauty Of Science Hugely Outranks The Charms Of Superstition.

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 Socialist Movement, By Removing Many, Many People From Grinding Stagnation And Poverty And Overwork, Does Enable People Not Just To Lead Better Lives But To Be Better People.

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.

When I Went To Czechoslovakia Under The Old Communist Regime One Day In The '80s, I Thought To Myself Whatever I Do, Whatever Happens To Me In Prague I'm Not Going To Use The Name Kafka, I'm Just Not Going To Do It. I Won't Do It; It's So Easy, Everyone Else Does, I'm Not Going To. I'll Write The First Non-kafka Mentioning Piece.

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

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

I Don’t Have A Body, I Am A Body.

I Am A Person Of Faith: I Am A Person Who Will Believe Practically Anything On No Evidence At All.

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

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

For Me, The Life Of The Angler Is An Almost Flawless Example Of How Not To Have A Good Time.

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.

It's Surprising To Me How Many Of My Friends Send Christmas Cards, Or Holiday Cards, Including My Atheist And Secular Friends.

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

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

Even With All The Advantages Of Retrospect, And A Lot Of Witnesses Dead And Gone, You Can't Make Your Life Look As If You Intended It Or You Were Consistent. All You Can Show Is How You Dealt With Various Hands.

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

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?

Well, I'll Put It This Way: You Can Certainly Say Belief In God Makes People Behave Worse. That Can Be Proved Beyond A Doubt.

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.

Our Weapons Are The Ironic Mind Against The Literal: The Open Mind Against The Credulous; The Courageous Pursuit Of Truth Against The Fearful And Abject Forces Who Would Set Limits To Investigation (and Who Stupidly Claim That We Already Have All The Truth We Need). Perhaps Above All, We Affirm Life Over The Cults Of Death And Human Sacrifice And Are Afraid, Not Of Inevitable Death, But Rather Of A Human Life That Is Cramped And Distorted By The Pathetic Need To Offer Mindless Adulation, Or The Dismal Belief That The Laws Of Nature Respond To Wailings And Incantations.

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

So Far, I Have Decided To Take Whatever My Disease Can Throw At Me, And To Stay Combative Even While Taking The Measure Of My Inevitable Decline. I Repeat, This Is No More Than What A Healthy Person Has To Do In Slower Motion.

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.

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

The Essence Of Tyranny Is Not Iron Law. It Is Capricious Law.

History Is A Tragegy, Not A Morality Tale.

The Whole Reason For The Success Of Dr. King's Civil-rights Movement Was That It Was Not A Movement For Itself. The Civil-rights Movement Understood Very Clearly, And Stated Very Beautifully, That It Was A Question Of Humanism, Not A Sectarian Movement At All.

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.

Well Look, I Mean, I Think That Prayer And Holy Water, And Things Like That Are All Fine. They Don't Do Any Good, But They Don't Necessarily Do Any Harm. It's Touching To Be Thought Of In That Way. It Makes Up For Those Who Tell Me That I've Got My Just Desserts.

There Is Almost No Country In Africa Where It Is Not Essential To Know To Which Tribe, Or Which Subgroup Of Which Tribe, The President Belongs. From This Single Piece Of Information You Can Trace The Lines Of Patronage And Allegiance That Define The State.

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Eknath Easwaran

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