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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!

-Christopher Hitchens

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Those Who Had Alleged

Christopher Hitchens

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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!

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I Didn't Think Marilyn Monroe Was Beautiful. It Used To Worry Me. I Thought Maybe I'm Not Put Together Like The Other Chaps.

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

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Ronald Reagan Used To Alarm His Soviet Counterparts By Saying That Surely They'd Both Unite Against An Invasion From Mars.

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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.

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An Individual Deficient In The Sense Of Humor Represents More Of A Challenge To Our Idea Of The Human Than A Person Of Subnormal Intelligence

Arguments That Explain Everything... Explain Nothing

Its A Matter Of Principle. If Jews Born In Brooklyn Have A Right To A State In Palestine Then Palestinians Born In Jerusalem Have A Right To A State In Palestine.

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

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Merry Christmas

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

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

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

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

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I Became A Journalist Partly So That I Wouldn't Ever Have To Rely On The Press For My Information.

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

I Have Decided To Take Whatever My Disease Can Throw At Me.

Very Often The Test Of One's Allegiance To A Cause Or To A People Is Precisely The Willingness To Stay The Course When Things Are Boring, To Run The Risk Of Repeating An Old Argument Just One More Time, Or Of Going One More Round With A Hostile Or (much Worse) Indifferent Audience.

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

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.

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.

How Dismal It Is To See Present Day Americans Yearning For The Very Orthodoxy That Their Country Was Founded To Escape.

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

[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.

You Can't Have Occupation And Human Rights.

Today I Want To Puke When I Hear The Word 'radical' Applied So Slothfully And Stupidly To Islamist Murderers; The Most Plainly Reactionary People In The World.

The Penalty For Getting Mugged In An American City And Losing Your Id Is That You Can't Fly Home.

My Own Opinion Is Enough For Me. And I Claim The Right To Defend It Against Any Consensus, Any Majority Anywhere, Any Place, Any Time. And Anyone Who Disagrees With This Can Pick A Number, Get In Line And Kiss My Ass.

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.

Religion Comes From The Period Of Human Prehistory Where Nobody - Not Even The Mighty Democritus Who Concluded That All Matter Was Made From Atoms - Had The Smallest Idea Of What Was Going On. It Comes From The Bawling And Fearful Infancy Of Our Species, And Is A Babyish Attempt To Meet Our Inescapable Demand For Knowledge. Today The Least Educated Of My Children Knows Much More About The Natural Order Than Any Of The Founders Of Religion.

It Ought To Be An Offense To Be Excruciating And Unfunny In Circumstances Where Your Audience Is Almost Morally Obliged To Enthuse.

Yes, I, Well, When I Write, As Often As I Can, I Try To Write As If I'm Talking To People. It Doesn't Always Work, And One Shouldn't Always Try It, But I Try And Write As If I Am Talking, And Trying To Engage The Reader In Conversation.

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

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

It Was Not For The Sake Of Oil That The Risky Decision To Cease This Corrupt Coexistence Was Made. But At Least Now The Iraqi People Have A Chance Of Controlling Their Own Main Resource, And It Will Be Our Task To Ensure That The Funding And Revenue Are Transparent Instead Of Opaque.

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

I Don't Think Consensus-building Politics Is What I'm Meant To Be Doing.

Consensus Building

It’s Considered Perfectly Normal In This Society To Approach Dying People Who You Don’t Know But Who Are Unbelievers And Say, ‘now Are You Gonna Change Your Mind?’ That Is Considered Almost A Polite Question.

Perfectly Normal

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

Trust Is Not The Same As Faith. A Friend Is Someone You Trust. Putting Faith In Anyone Is A Mistake.

Part Of The Function Of Memory Is To Forget; The Omni-retentive Mind Will Break Down And Produce At Best An Idiot Savant Who Can Recite A Telephone Book, And At Worst A Person To Whom Every Grudge And Slight Is As Yesterday's.

Even The Most Humane And Compassionate Of The Monotheisms And Polytheisms Are Complicit In This Quiet And Irrational Authoritarianism: They Proclaim Us, In Fulke Greville's Unforgettable Line, "created Sick Commanded To Be Well." And There Are Totalitarian Insinuations To Back This Up If Its Appeal Should Fail.

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.

Unless A Reincarnationist Is Willing To Say There Was A 'first Generation' Of Souls Created With The First Humans, He Is Exposed To Absurdity By The Recency Of Human Life On The Planet.

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

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

You Have To Choose Your Future Regrets.

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'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.

Religion Makes Kind People Say Unkind Things: "i Must Prove My Faith, So Mutilate The Genitals Of My Children." They Wouldn't Do That If God Didn't Tell Them To Do So.

The Best Blended Scotch In The History Of The World - Which Was Also The Favourite Drink Of The Iraqi Baath Party, As It Still Is Of The Palestinian Authority And The Libyan Dictatorship And Large Branches Of The Saudi Arabian Royal Family - Is Johnnie Walker Black. Breakfast Of Champions, Accept No Substitute.

It's Considered Acceptable In Our Culture To Approach Perfect Strangers, As Often Or Not Who May Be In Extremis, And Evangelise. I Don't See Why That's Considered A Normal Thing.

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

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.

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

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

Beware The Irrational, However Seductive. Shun The 'transcendent' And All Who Invite You To Subordinate Or Annihilate Yourself. Distrust Compassion; Prefer Dignity For Yourself And Others. Don't Be Afraid To Be Thought Arrogant Or Selfish. Picture All Experts As If They Were Mammals. Never Be A Spectator Of Unfairness Or Stupidity. Seek Out Argument And Disputation For Their Own Sake; The Grave Will Supply Plenty Of Time For Silence. Suspect Your Own Motives, And All Excuses. Do Not Live For Others Any More Than You Would Expect Others To Live For You.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Can't Compose Or Play Music; I'm Not That Fortunate. But I Can Write And I Can Talk And Sometimes When I'm Doing Either Of These Things I Realize That I've Written A Sentence Or Uttered A Thought That I Didn't Absolutely Know I Had In Me... Until I Saw It On The Page Or Heard Myself Say It.

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

There's A Big Difference, As I'm Sure You Know, It's A Slightly Manneristic One, Between People Of The '60s And People Of '68. Being A Soixante-huitard - It's So Nice To Have A French Word For It - Is Very Different From Just Having Happened To Been A Baby Boomer In The '60s.

I Don't Think The Soul Is Immortal, Or At Least Not Immortal In Individuals, But It May Be Immortal As An Aspect Of The Human Personality Because When I Talk About What Literature Nourishes, It Would Be Silly Of Me Or Reductionist To Say That It Nourishes The Brain.

When The [us] President Writes To Kim Jong Il, The Son, The Dear Leader, He Doesn't Call Him Dear Mr President, He Calls Him Dear Mr Secretary. Have You Ever Noticed That? Why Is That? Because He's Not The President Of North Korea, He's The Head Of The Communist Party, The North Korean Workers' Party And He's The Head Of The Army. He's Not Head Of The State. The Head Of The State Is His Father, Who's Been Dead For 15 Years.

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.

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.

To Be In Opposition Is Not To Be A Nihilist. And There Is No Decent Or Charted Way Of Making A Living At It. It Is Something You Are, And Not Something You Do.

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.

We Have Millions And Millions Of North Korean Children Totally Stunted In Mind And Body And Will Have To Be Dealt With At Some Point, Who Have Been Raised To Believe That They Live In A Regime That Is Run By A God.

Time Spent Arguing With The Faithful Is, Oddly Enough, Almost Never Wasted.

It's Normally Agreed That The Question 'how Are You?' Doesn't Put You On Your Oath To Give A Full Or Honest Answer.

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

In The Grip Of A Neurological Disorder, I Am Fast Losing Control Of Words Even As My Relationship With The World Has Been Reduced To Them.

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

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

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.

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!

Today The Least Educated Of My Children Knows Much More About The Natural Order Than Any Of The Founders Of Religion, And One Would Think-though The Connection Is Not A Fully Demonstrable One-that This Is Why They Seem So Uninterested In Sending Fellow Humans To Hell.

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.

I Think Everybody Has Had The Experience At Some Point When They Feel That There's More To Life Than Just Matter. But I Think It's Very Important To Keep That Under Control And Not To Hand It Over To Be Exploited By Priests And Shamans And Rabbis And Other Riffraff.

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

I Felt Clinton Represented The Worst Of The 1960s.

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.

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.

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.

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

Nothing Could Make Me Forget What The Reagan Years Had Actually Been Like.

The Term 'the American Left' Is As Near To Being Meaningless Or Nonsensical As Any Term Could Really Be In Politics. It Isn't Really A Force In Politics Anymore. And It Would Do Well To Ask Itself Why That Is.

The Only Position That Leaves Me With No Cognitive Dissonance Is Atheism.

Cognitive Dissonance

Virtue And Merit Can Become Their Opposites If They Are Exacted Or Compelled.

I Don't Think It's Possible To Have A Sense Of Tragedy Without Having A Sense Of Humor.

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.

When I Meet People Who Say - Which They Do All Of The Time - 'i Must Just Tell You, My Great Aunt Had Cancer Of The Elbow And The Doctors Gave Her 10 Seconds To Live, But Last I Heard She Was Climbing Mount Everest,' And So Forth, I Switch Off Quite Early.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Eternal Vigilance

I'm Dying, But So Are You

In An Average Day, You May Well Be Confronted With Some Species Of Bullying Or Bigotry, Or Some Ill-phrased Appeal To The General Will, Or Some Petty Abuse Of Authority. If You Have A Political Loyalty, You May Be Offered A Shady Reason For Agreeing To A Lie Or A Half-truth That Serves Some Short-term Purpose. Everybody Devises Tactics For Getting Through Such Moments; Try Behaving "as If" They Need Not Be Tolerated And Are Not Inevitable.

The United States Has An Isolationist And Insular Culture, Combined With A Global And Interventionist Posture. This Highly Dangerous And Febrile Mixture, Which Greatly Facilitates The Task Of The Fear-mongers And Chauvinists, Needs A Very Exact And Nuanced Diagnosis. I Don't Think That Analogies From The Totalitarian Model, However Suggestive, Are Sufficient.

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

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.

Those Who Are Determined To Be 'offended' Will Discover A Provocation Somewhere. We Cannot Possibly Adjust Enough To Please The Fanatics, And It Is Degrading To Make The Attempt.

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.

It's True That Obscenity Is A Matter Of Taste And In The Eye Of The Beholder.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There Are Things About Quitting The Smoking Habit For Which Nobody Prepares You. Did I Have Any Idea That I Would Indulge In Long, Drooling-nay, Dribbling-lascivious Dreams In Which I Was Still Wreathed In Fragrant Blue Fumes? I Would Wake With The Complete And Guilty Conviction That I Had Sinned In Word And Deed While I Was Asleep.

Religion Has Run Out Of Justifications. Thanks To The Telescope And The Microscope, It No Longer Offers An Explanation Of Anything Important. Where Once It Used To Able, By Its Total Command Of A Worldview, To Prevent The Emergence Of Rivals, It Can Now Only Impede And Retard-or Try To Turn Back-the Measureable Advances That We Have Made.

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.

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]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.

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