Background Image

...

I Can’t Hope To Convey The Full Effect Of The Embraces And Avowals, But I Can Perhaps Offer A Crumb Of Counsel. If There Is Anybody Known To You Who Might Benefit From A Letter Or A Visit, Do Not On Any Account Postpone The Writing Or The Making Of It. The Difference Made Will Almost Certainly Be More Than You Have Calculated

-Christopher Hitchens

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

I Can’t Hope To

Christopher Hitchens

...

I Can’t Hope To Convey The Full Effect Of The Embraces And Avowals, But I Can Perhaps Offer A Crumb Of Counsel. If There Is Anybody Known To You Who Might Benefit From A Letter Or A Visit, Do Not On Any Account Postpone The Writing Or The Making Of It. The Difference Made Will Almost Certainly Be More Than You Have Calculated

Views: 9

Topic

More From Christopher Hitchens

There Are Two Clocks Ticking In Iran. One Is The Democracy Movement Clock Which Is Ticking Now Faster Than It Was But It's Got A Lot Of Catching Up To Do. And Then There's The Clock That's Ticking Towards A Nuclear Weaponry.

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.

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.

I'm Not Resigned, But I'm Realistic Too. The Statistics In My Case Are Very Poor. Not Many People Come Through Esophageal Cancer And Live To Talk About It, Or Not For Long.

A Sort Of Moral Blackmail Is Exerted From Both Poles. The Underclass, One Gathers, Should Be Dulled With Charity And Welfare Provision Lest It Turn Nasty. The Upper Class Must Likewise Be Conciliated By Vast Handouts, Lest It Lose The "incentive" To Go On Generating Wealth.

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

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

What Better Way For A Ruling Class To Claim And Hold Power Than To Pose As The Defenders Of The Nation.

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.

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.”

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

Human Society Is Inconceivable Unless Words Are To Some Extent Bonds.

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.

I've Had Some Dark Nights Of The Soul, Of Course, But Giving In To Depression Would Be A Sellout, A Defeat.

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

No Possible Future Government In Kabul Can Be Worse Than The Taliban, And No Thinkable Future Government Would Allow The Level Of Al Qaeda Gangsterism To Recur. So The Outcome Is Proportionate And Congruent With International Principles Of Self-defense.

Nothing Optional -- From Homosexuality To Adultery -- Is Ever Made Punishable Unless Those Who Do The Prohibiting (and Exact The Fierce Punishment) Have A Repressed Desire To Participate.

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

The Totalitarian, To Me, Is The Enemy - The One That's Absolute, The One That Wants Control Over The Inside Of Your Head, Not Just Your Actions And Your Taxes.

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

[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.

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.

Cancer Victimhood Contains A Permanent Temptation To Be Self-centred And Even Solipsistic.

What They [the 9/11 Attackers] Abominate About 'the West', To Put It In A Phrase, Is Not What Western Liberals Don't Like And Can't Defend About Their Own System, But What They Do Like About It And Must Defend: Its Emancipated Women, Its Scientific Inquiry, Its Separation Of Religion From The State.

If You Gave [jerry] Falwell An Enema He Could Be Buried In A Matchbox.

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

Chomsky Proceeds On The Almost Unthinkably Subversive Assumption That The United States Should Be Judged By The Same Standards That It Preaches (often At Gunpoint) To Other Nations He Is Nearly The Only Person Now Writing Who Assumes A Single Standard Of International Morality Not For Rhetorical Effect, But As A Matter Of Habitual, Practically Instinctual Conviction.

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

America Was Not Interventionist Enough, Which, Of Course, Did Mean A Bit Of A Breach With Old Comrades On The Left. I Felt The International Left In The Countries Concerned Took The Same Position As I Did. So, In My View, It's The Left That's Become Reactionary And Isolationist And Parochial.

Evolution Has Meant That Our Prefrontal Lobes Are Too Small, Our Adrenal Glands Are Too Big, And Our Reproductive Organs Apparently Designed By Committee; A Recipe Which, Alone Or In Combination, Is Very Certain To Lead To Some Unhappiness And Disorder.

High Moral Character Is Not A Precondition For Great Moral Accomplishments.

Intellectuals Never Sound More Foolish Than When Posing As The Last Civilised Man.

The People Who Tend To Raise Antiwar Slogans Will Do So Generally When It's American Or British Interests Involved.

We Have Known For A Long Time That Prince Charles' Empty Sails Are So Rigged As To Be Swelled By Any Passing Waft Or Breeze Of Crankiness And Cant. He Fell For The Fake Anthropologist Laurens Van Der Post. He Was Bowled Over By The Charms Of Homeopathic Medicine. He Has Been Believably Reported As Saying That Plants Do Better If You Talk To Them In A Soothing And Encouraging Way

How Ya Doin'?' I Always Think, What Kind Of A Question Is That?, And I Always Reply, 'a Bit Early To Tell.

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.

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

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

No School Of Philosophy Has Ever Solved This Question Of Whether Being Determines Consciousness Or The Other Way Around. It May Be A False Antithesis.

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

A Good Day Is One Where I Can Not Just Read A Book, But Write A Review Of It. Maybe Today I'll Be Able To Do That. I Get For Some Reason Somewhat Stronger When The Sun Starts To Go Down. Dusk Is A Good Time For Me. I'm Crepuscular.

I'm An Atheist. I'm Not Neutral About Religion, I'm Hostile To It. I Think It Is A Positively Bad Idea, Not Just A False One. And I Mean Not Just Organized Religion, But Religious Belief Itself.

To Describe This Film As Dishonest And Demagogic Would Almost Be To Promote Those Terms To The Level Of Respectability. To Describe This Film As A Piece Of Crap Would Be To Run The Risk Of A Discourse That Would Never Again Rise Above The Excremental. To Describe It As An Exercise In Facile Crowd-pleasing Would Be Too Obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 Is A Sinister Exercise In Moral Frivolity, Crudely Disguised As An Exercise In Seriousness.

Ordinary Morality Is Innate In My View.

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.

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.

Rosa Luxemburg Was - Still Is For Me - A Great Personal And Intellectual Heroine. Her Analysis Of Leninism And Capitalism And Social Democracy Are All Worth Reading. I Wouldn't Consider Anyone Truly Politically Literate If They Hadn't Given Her Work At Least Some Study.

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.

Flaubert Was Right When He Said That Our Use Of Language Is Like A Cracked Kettle On Which We Bang Out Tunes For Bears To Dance To, While All The Time We Need To Move The Very Stars To Pity.

I'd Like To Prove To Other People That It's Not The End Of Everything To Be Diagnosed With Cancer.

If You Want To Stay In For The Long Haul, And Lead A Life That Is Free From Illusions Either Propagated By You Or Embraced By You, Then I Suggest You Learn To Recognize And Avoid The Symptoms Of The Zealot And The Person Who Knows He Is Right. For The Dissenter, The Skeptical Mentality Is At Least As Important As Any Armor Of Principle.

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.

My Chief Consolation In This Year Of Living Dyingly Has Been The Presence Of Friends.

I Have More Than Once In My Time Woken Up Feeling Like Death.

Suppose There Were Groups Of Secularists At Hospitals Who Went Round The Terminally Ill And Urged Them To Adopt Atheism: 'don't Be A Mug All Your Life. Make Your Last Days The Best Ones. People Might Suppose This Was In Poor Taste.

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.

Kissinger Projects A Strong Impression Of A Man At Home In The World And On Top Of His Brief. But There Are A Number Of Occasions When It Suits Him To Pose As A Sort Of Candide: Naive, And Ill-prepared For And Easily Unhorsed By Events. No Doubt This Pose Costs Him Something In Point Of Self-esteem. It Is A Pose, Furthermore, Which He Often Adopts At Precisely The Time When The Record Shows Him To Be Knowledgeable, And When Knowledge Or Foreknowledge Would Also Confront Him With Charges Of Responsibility Or Complicity.

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.

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.

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.

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

We Have Lived In A World Where The Discoveries Of Physics And Genetics Are Far More Awe-inspiring, As Well As Infinitely More Liberating, Than The Claims Of Any Religion.

Forgotten Were The Elementary Rules Of Logic, That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence And That What Can Be Asserted Without Evidence Can Also Be Dismissed Without Evidence.

I Apply The Abraham Lincoln Test For Moral Casuistry: 'if Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong.' Well, Then, If Waterboarding Does Not Constitute Torture, Then There Is No Such Thing As Torture.

He's A Man [george W. Bush] Who Is Lucky To Be Governor Of Texas. He Is A Man Who Is Unusually Incurious, Abnormally Unintelligent, Amazingly Inarticulate, Fantastically Uncultured, Extraordinarily Uneducated, And Apparently Quite Proud Of All These Things.

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.

The Violence In The Bible Is Appalling.

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's Not At All Good When Your Cancer Is 'palpable' From The Outside. Especially When, As At This Stage, They Didn't Even Know Where The Primary Source Was. Carcinoma Works Cunningly From The Inside Out. Detection And Treatment Often Work More Slowly And Gropingly, From The Outside In.

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.

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

For Most Of My Life I Let Women Do The Driving And Was Happy To Let Them.

For A Lot Of People, Their First Love Is What They'll Always Remember. For Me It's Always Been The First Hate, And I Think That Hatred, Though It Provides Often Rather Junky Energy, Is A Terrific Way Of Getting You Out Of Bed In The Morning And Keeping You Going.

I'm A Member Of No Party. I Have No Ideology. I'm A Rationalist. I Do What I Can In The International Struggle Between Science And Reason And The Barbarism, Superstition And Stupidity That's All Around Us.

[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.

I've Been To Uganda And To North Korea And To Eritrea, Countless Horror Spots Around The World.

A Sure Sign Of Ineptitude And Malice Is Manifested When One's Attacker Is Willing To Cover Himself With Mud In Order To Try And Make Some Of It Adhere To His Target.

Chemotherapy Isn't Good For You. So When You Feel Bad, As I Am Feeling Now, You Think, 'well That Is A Good Thing Because It's Supposed To Be Poison. If It's Making The Tumor Feel This Queasy, Then I'm Ok With It.'

Religion Is Not Just Incongruent With Morality, But In Essential Ways Incompatible With It.

Shepherds Don't Look After Sheep Because They Love Them - Although I Do Think Some Shepherds Like Their Sheep Too Much. They Look After Their Sheep So They Can, First, Fleece Them And Second, Turn Them Into Meat. That's Much More Like The Priesthood As I Know It.

Urging Humans To Be Superhumans, On Pain Of Death And Torture, Is The Urging Of Terrible Self-abasement At Their Repeated And Inevitable Failure To Keep The Rules.

Perhaps The Values Of Socialists Can Only Be Realized By Socialists In A Nonsocialist Society.

Religion Is Man-made. Even The Men Who Made It Cannot Agree On What Their Prophets Or Redeemers Or Gurus Actually Said Or Did.

[e]xceptional Claims Demand Exceptional Evidence.

In The Ordinary Moral Universe, The Good Will Do The Best They Can, The Worst Will Do The Worst They Can, But If You Want To Make Good People Do Wicked Things, You’ll Need Religion.

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

How Do I Know That I Know This, Except That I've Always Been Taught This And Never Heard Anything Else? [...] How Sure Am I Of My Own Views? Don't Take Refuge In The False Security Of Consensus, And The Feeling That Whatever You Think You're Bound To Be Okay, Because You're In The Safely Moral Majority.

One Of The Reasons I Decided To Apply For American Citizenship After Something Like A Quarter Of Century Of Living Here On A British, European Union Passport And A Green Card, Was My Identification With The United States In The Post-september 11th Period.

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?

It Is Only Those Who Hope To Transform Human Beings Who End Up By Burning Them, Like The Waste Product Of A Failed Experiment.

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.

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

[p]erhaps You Notice How The Denial Is So Often The Preface To The Justification.

Owners Of Dogs Will Have Noticed That, If You Provide Them With Food And Water And Shelter And Affection, They Will Think You Are God. Whereas Owners Of Cats Are Compelled To Realize That, If You Provide Them With Food And Water And Affection, They Draw The Conclusion That They Are God.

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

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

The Crucial Distinction Between Systems...was No Longer Ideological. The Main Political Difference Was Between Those Who Did, And Those Who Did Not, Believe That The Citizen Could -- Or Should -- Be The Property Of The State.

Political Differences

The Press Is Still Investing Itself, It Seems To Me, In A Sort Of Cynicism. It Comes Out Better For Them If They Can Predict Hard Times, Bogging Down, Sniping, Attrition.

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

For Some Reason, Which I Believe I Can Guess, The Churches/mosques Want Control Of People When Or While They Are The Most Vulnerable Or Suggestible. If They Can't Get Them In School, Then They Get Them When They Are Hungry, Or Frightened, Or Ill, Or Homeless, Or Unemployed. Same Difference. Here's Your Gruel, And Here's A Tract.

Philosophy Begins Where Religion Ends, Just As By Analogy Chemistry Begins Where Alchemy Runs Out, And Astronomy Takes The Place Of Astrology.

A Wide And Vague Impression Exists That So-called Eastern Religion Is More Contemplative, Innocuous, And Humane Than The Proselytizing Monotheisms Of The West. Don't Believe A Word Of This: Try Asking The Children Of Indochina Who Were Dumped By Their Parents For Inherited Deformities That Were Attributed To Sins In A Previous 'life.

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

Religion Of Every Kind Involves The Promise That The Misery And Futility Of Existence Can Be Overcome Or Even Transfigured. One Might Suppose That The Possession Of Such A Magnificent Formula, Combined With The Tremendous Assurance Of A Benevolent God, Would Make A Person Happy. But Such Appears Not To Be The Case.: Unease And Insecurity And Rage Seem To Keep Up With Blissful Certainty, And Even To Outpace It.

Those Who Want To Be Offended Don't Have The Right To Try And Close Down The Newspaper That Offends Them.

Heroism Breaks Its Heart, And Idealism Its Back, On The Intransigence Of The Credulous And The Mediocre, Manipulated By The Cynical And The Corrupt.

Literature, Not Scripture, Sustains The Mind And - Since There Is No Other Metaphor - Also The Soul.

There Are Many, Many Discrepant Views Within The Shia Theology About What's The Proper Role Of Religion In Society Or In The State, Should It Rule Now, Should It Claim To Govern People In The Here And Now, Or Should It Wait Until The Messiah, The 12th Imam, Comes Back And Would It Only Be Then Appropriate For Religious Rule To Bring About A World Of Universal Justice And Vindication.

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

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.

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.

The Gods That We've Made Are Exactly The Gods You'd Expect To Be Made By A Species That's About Half A Chromosome Away From Being Chimpanzee.

There Are All Kinds Of Stupid People That Annoy Me But What Annoys Me Most Is A Lazy Argument.

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.

The Role Of Dissident Is Not, And Should Not Be, A Claim Of Membership In A Communion Of Saints. In Other Words, The More Fallible The Mammal, The Truer The Example.

The Suicide-bombing Community Is Not Absolutely 100 Percent Religious, But It Is Pretty Nearly 100 Percent Religious.

I Don't Say Things Like "the Grace Of God." All That's White Noise To Me, Not Because I'm An Intellectual. For Many People, It's Gibberish. Likewise, The Idea That The Koran Was Dictated By An Archaic Illiterate Is A Fantasy.

The Person Who Is Certain, And Who Claims Divine Warrant For His Certainty, Belongs Now To The Infancy Of Our Species.

People Are Frightened Of Death, And The Central Lie Of All Religion Is That There’s A Cure For This And An Exception We’ve Made In Your Own Case: An Eternal Life Offered If You Make The Right Propitiations And The Right Abjections. Well, I’m Sorry. I Think That It's The Height Of Immorality To Lie To People Like That. That’s Why [religion] Survives.

You Have To Choose Your Future Regrets.

There Are, After All, Atheists Who Say They Wish The Fable Were True But Are Unable To Suspend The Requisite Disbelief, Or Who Have Relinquished Belief Only With Regret. To This I Reply: Who Wishes That There Was A Permanent, Unalterable Celestial Despotism That Subjected Us To Continual Surveillance And Could Convict Us Of Thought-crime, And Who Regarded Us As Its Private Property Even After We Died? How Happy We Ought To Be, At The Reflection That There Exists Not A Shred Of Respectable Evidence To Support Such A Horrible Hypothesis.

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.

Exceptional Claims, Require Exceptional Evidence.

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

When You Fall Ill, People Send You Cds. Very Often, In My Experience, These Are By Leonard Cohen

I'm Dying, But So Are You

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.

To What Faults Do You Feel Most Indulgent? To The Ones That Arise From Urgent Material Needs.

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.

I Personally Want To "do" Death In The Active And Not The Passive, And To Be There To Look It In The Eye And Be Doing Something When It Comes For Me.

Ronald Reagan Used To Alarm Other Constituencies By Speaking Freely About The End Times Foreshadowed In The Bible.

Religion Attacks Us In Our Deepest Integrity By Saying We Wouldn't Be Able To Make A Moral Decision Without It.

Mockery Of Religion Is One Of The Most Essential Things Because To Demystify Supposedly 'holy Text Dictated By God' And Show That They Are Man Made And What You Have To Show [is] There Internal Inconsistencies And Absurdities. One Of The Beginnings Of Human Emancipation Is The Ability To Laugh At Authority... It Is An Indispensable Thing People Can Call It Blasphemy If They Like, But If They Call It That They Have To Assume There Is Something To Be Blasphemed - Some Divine Work, Well I Don't Accept The Premise.

Hannah Arendt In Her Study Of Totalitarianism Borrowed From Immanuel Kant The Concept Of Radical Evil, Of Evil That's So Evil That In The End It Destroys Itself, It's So Committed To Evil And It's So Committed To Hatred And Cruelty That It Becomes Suicidal. My Definition Of It Is The Surplus Value That's Generated By Totalitarianism. It Means You Do More Violence, More Cruelty Than You Absolutely Have To To Stay In Power.

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.

Jesus, It Is True, Shows No Personal Interest In Gain, But He Does Speak Of Treasure In Heaven And Even Of Mansions As An Inducement To Follow Him. Is It Not Further True That All Religions Down The Ages Have Shown A Keen Interest In The Amassment Of Material Goods In The Real World?

I Joined A Small But Growing Post-trotskyite Luxembourgist Sect.

Many Religions Now Come Before Us With Ingratiating Smirks And Outspread Hands, Like An Unctuous Merchant In A Bazaar. They Offer Consolation And Solidarity And Uplift, Competing As They Do In A Marketplace. But We Have A Right To Remember How Barbarically They Behaved When They Were Strong And Were Making An Offer That People Could Not Refuse.

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.

Arguments That Explain Everything... Explain Nothing

If The Qur'an Was The Word Of God, It Had Been Dictated On A Very Bad Day.

We Become Accomplices In Evil Every Time We Seek To Soothe The Unslakable Appetites Of The Crime Family That Sits In Pyongyang.

To 'choose' Dogma And Faith Over Doubt And Experience Is To Throw Out The Ripening Vintage And To Reach Greedily For The Kool-aid.

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.

The Thing About Religion Is That It's The First And The Worst. The Worst Because It's The First.

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.

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

In Particular, It Is Absurd To Hope To Banish Envy Of Other People's Possessions Or Fortunes, If Only Because The Spirit Of Envy Can Lead To Emulation And Ambition And Have Positive Consequences.

It's Probably A Merciful Thing That Pain Is Impossible To Describe From Memory

There Is No English Surname, However Ancient And Dignified, That Cannot Instantly Be Improved By The Prefix ‘spanker’.

I Learned That To Be Amusing Was Not To Be Frivolous And That Language - Always The Language - Was The Magic Key As Much To Prose As To Poetry.

And Yet, I Wake Up Every Day To A Sensation Of Pervading Disgust And Annoyance. I Probably Ought To Carry Around Some Kind Of Thermometer Or Other Instrument, To Keep Checking That I Am Not Falling Prey To Premature Curmudgeonhood.

Gullibility And Credulity Are Considered Undesireable Qualities In Every Department Of Human Life - Except Religion ... Why Are We Praised By Godly Men For Surrendering Our 'godly Gift' Of Reason When We Cross Their Mental Thresholds?

The Governor Of Texas, Who, When Asked If The Bible Should Also Be Taught In Spanish, Replied That 'if English Was Good Enough For Jesus, Then It's Good Enough For Me.

Suddenly That It Was As Dangerous To Be In America As It Was To Be Overseas. So That The False Distinction That's Made By The Anti-war Movement Between Being Over There And Over Here Was Exposed For All To See As An Illusion. Although A Number Of People, A Large Amount Of People Still Share In It. In Other Words, When I've Been In Iraq Or Afghanistan, I've Probably Been Safer Because I Can Carry A Weapon If I Have To, Than My Wife And Daughter Are Living In Washington.

A Good Liar Must Have A Good Memory. Kissinger Is A Stupendous Liar With A Remarkable Memory.

Nonintervention Does Not Mean That Nothing Happens. It Means That Something Else Happens.

No One Has The Right To Tell Me What To Do Because He Has A Divine Warrant.

The Disquieting Thing About Newscaster-babble Or Editorial-speak Is Its Ready Availability As A Serf Idiom, A Vernacular Of Deference. "mr. Secretary, Are We Any Nearer To Bringing About A Dialogue In This Process ?

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.

(howard) Dean Is A Raving Nut Bag...a Raving, Sinister, Demagogic Nutbag...i And A Few Other People Saw That He Should Be Destroyed.

David Irving Is Not Just A Fascist Historian. He Is Also A Great Historian Of Fascism.

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'.

Friendship Love

I Became A Journalist Because One Didn't Have To Specialise.

A Rule Of Thumb With Humor; If You Worry That You Might Be Going Too Far, You Have Already Not Gone Far Enough. If Everybody Laughs, You Have Failed.

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

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.

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

'wasp' Is The Only Ethnic Term That Is In Fact A Term Of Class, Apart From Redneck, Which Is Another Word For The Same Group But Who Are In The Lower Social Strata, So It's Inexplicably Tied Up With Social Standing And Culture And History In A Way That The Other Hyphenations Just Are Not.

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.

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.

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.

The Trade-off Between Freedom And Security, So Often Proposed So Seductively, Very Often Leads To The Loss Of Both.

Eternal Vigilance

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.

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.

Do I Fear Death? No, I Am Not Afraid Of Being Dead Because There's Nothing To Be Afraid Of, I Won't Know It. I Fear Dying, Of Dying I Feel A Sense Of Waste About It And I Fear A Sordid Death, Where I Am Incapacitated Or Imbecilic At The End Which Isn't Something To Be Afraid Of, It's Something To Be Terrified Of.

The First Thing I Can Remember I Ever Wanted Was To Go To The United States. And For Reasons That Are As Conventional As You Can Imagine: I Wanted To Know If It Was Really True That It Was The Land Of Opportunity, Of Democracy, And Individual Liberty.

If I Could Do Just One Thing, It Would Be To Dissociate Faith From Virtue, Now And For Good, And To Expose It For What It Is, A Servile Weakness, A Refuge In Cowardice, And A Willingness To Follow, With Credulity, People Who Are In The Highest Degree Unscrupulous.

Terrorism Is The Tactic Of Demanding The Impossible, And Demanding It At Gunpoint.

I've Proved To Be As Difficult To Convert As I Am To Hypnotize.

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

Not Since North Korean Media Declared Kim Jong-il To Be The Reincarnation Of Kim Il Sung Has There Been Such A Blatant Attempt To Create A Necrocracy, Or Perhaps Mausolocracy, In Which A Living Claimant Assumes The Fleshly Mantle Of The Departed.

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

I'm Very Happy By Myself - I'm Lucky In That Way - If I've Got Enough To Read And Something To Write About And A Bit Of Alcohol For Me To Add An Edge, Not To Dull It.

I Can Never Quite Decide Whether The Anti-columbus Movement Is Merely Risible Or Faintly Sinister. It Is Sinister, Though, Because It Is An Ignorant Celebration Of Stasis And Backwardness, With An Unpleasant Tinge Of Self-hatred.

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

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 Could Not Do What I Do, And Teach A Class, And Never Miss A Deadline, Never Be Late For Anything If I Was A Lush, Ok? I Would Really Love To Read A Piece That Said, 'he Is Not A Lush.' That Would Be Fabulous, It Would Be A First, I Could Show It To People And Say, 'look!'

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

Though It Is True We Are The Highest And Smartest Animals, Ospreys Have Eyes We Have Calculated To Be Sixty Times More Powerful And Sophisticated Than Our Own And That Blindness, Often Caused By Microscopic Parasites That Are Themselves Miracles Of Ingenuity, Is One Of The Oldest And Most Tragic Disorders Known To Man. And Why Award The Superior Eye (or In The Case Of Cat Or Bat, Also The Ear) To The Inferior Species.

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.

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.

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.

The Beauty Of Science Hugely Outranks The Charms Of Superstition.

If We Have Free Will, By Definition We Cannot Be Granted It. We Can't Be Given It. My [-audio-recording-distorted-] Paradox States That 'of Course We Have Free Will, We Have No Choice.' To Say That It's A Gift Is To Negate The Whole Concept Of Free Will On Its Face. So, If That Isn't Self-evident, I Can't Think Of Anything That Would Meet The Definition Of Being Self-evident.

I'm A Single-issue Voter, To Get Straight To The Point. I'm Really Only Interested In The Candidate Who's Toughest And Least Apologetic When It Comes To The Confrontation With Islamic Jihadism.

Faith Is The Surrender Of The Mind; It's The Surrender Of Reason, It's The Surrender Of The Only Thing That Makes Us Different From Other Mammals. It's Our Need To Believe, And To Surrender Our Skepticism And Our Reason, Our Yearning To Discard That And Put All Our Trust Or Faith In Someone Or Something, That Is The Sinister Thing To Me. Of All The Supposed Virtues, Faith Must Be The Most Overrated.

Henry Kissinger Should Have The Door Shut In His Face By Every Decent Person And Should Be Shamed, Ostracized And Excluded.

Trending Author

Antonio Banderas

Richard G. Scott

Category