Christopher Hitchens

Older brother of Peter Hitchens.

Studied at Oxford University.

Came to the United States in 1981.

Contributing editor, Vanity Fair.

He died at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

His writing took him to Northern Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain and Argentina in the 1970s reporting for The Nation, The New Statesman, and other British publications.

He left The Nation publication in 2003 after he publicly announced his support of the American invasion of Iraq.

Son of a career officer in the British Royal Navy who turned bookkeeper and his mother.

His family sent him to private schools in Tavistock in Tavistock, Devon, England and Cambridge School in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. He graduated from Balliol College at Oxford University in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England in 1970.

He married a Greek Cypriot, Eleni Meleagiou. He is survived by their two children, Alexander Hitchens and Sophia Hitchens; his second wife, Carol Blue Hitchens and their daughter, Antonia Hitchens; and his brother, Peter Hitchens.

He was summoned to Athens, Greece in 1973, after his mother, who had left his father, committed suicide with her male partner. In 1987, he learned that his mother was Jewish, which she concealed from her husband and family.

He moved to the United States in 1981 where he became a naturalized citizen.

At the suggestion of his boss, "Vanity Fair" editor Graydon Carter , Hitchens agreed to undergo the controversial "waterboarding" interrogation procedure for purposes of hands-on research for the magazine. Even though Hitchens was professionally supervised throughout the session and could stop the procedure at any time, he lasted less than 20 seconds before giving the hand-signal to terminate the experiment.

Babysat actress Olivia Wilde when she was a child.

Lampooned by comedy duo Mitchell and Webb.

The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex,and picnics.

[on believing in God in 2007] It would be like living in North Korea.

Politics is essentially a matter of character.

[defending Salman Rushdie during his exile] It 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.

At 7 years old, I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the,papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in,Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was,dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.

Dickens was able to mine this huge resource of London life, becoming the,conductor and chronicler like nobody since Shakespeare himself.

[to Charlton Heston, in a televised debate] Keep your hairpiece on.

Human decency is not the result of religion, it precedes it.

Those who offer false consolation are false friends.

The literal mind cannot understand the ironic one.

On his death, Pope John Paul was praised among other things for the,number of apologies he had made. . . This seemed to say that the Church,had mainly been wrong and often criminal in the past, but was now,purged of its sin by confession and quite ready to be infallible all,over again.

Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer,that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things. . . one of the,beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and,unwieldy advantage of having come first.

[Quoting Folke Greville] Oh, wearisome condition of humanity! Born under,one law, to another bound; vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;,created sick, commanded to be sound.

Like most people who claim to be apolitical, Mother Teresa is in,practice and in theory an ally of the status quo. And when the status,quo is threatened, a trusted ally of the conservative forces.

Modesty, simplicity, humility. By these canonical key words we are,taught that we may recognize saints. Yet Mother Teresa regards herself,as mandated by heaven, which is hardly modest. She lends spiritual,solace to dictators and to wealthy exploiters which is scarcely the,essence of simplicity. And she preaches surrender and prostration to,the poor which a truly humble person would barely have the nerve to do.

When she speaks about private or public morality, opposing family,planning for example, or defining abortion as quite literally the,greatest threat to world peace, she takes on the grim and tedious tones,of the zealot and the fanatic. In a Godless and cynical age it may be,inevitable that people will seek to praise the self-effacing, the,altruistic and the pure in heart, but only a complete collapse of our,critical faculties can explain the illusion that such a person is,manifested in the shape of a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant,of earthly powers.

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.

Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from,which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself,invokes prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to its,adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the,bargain. There is nothing - absolutely nothing - in its teachings that,can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

A cruel or rude child is a ghastly thing, but a cruel or brutal parent,can do infinitely more harm.

If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond,disagreement with its author and try to identify the sins and,deformities that animated him to write it, and I have certainly noticed,that those who publicly affirm Charity and Compassion and Forgiveness,are often inclined to take this course, then he or she will not just be,quarreling with the unknowable and ineffable Creator who presumably,opted to make me this way. . .

I would put all this down to sexual repression, but one of the Doctrines,preached IS sexual repression.

The disturbing thing about the [9/11] hijackers is not so much that they,desired virgins, but that they were virgins.

Behind the Veil of Oz there is only bluff.

Why, if God was the Creator of All Things, were we supposed to praise,him so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally? This seemed,servile, apart from anything else. If Jesus could heal a blind person,he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness? What was so wonderful,about him casting out devils, so that the devils would enter a herd of,pigs instead? That seemed sinister, more like black magic. With all,this continual prayer, why no result? Why did I have to keep saying, in,public, that I was a "miserable sinner"? Why was the subject of sex,considered so toxic? These faltering and childish objections are, I,have since discovered, extremely commonplace, partly because no,religion can meet them with a satisfactory answer.

"You may not see the point of all this Faith now, but you will do once,you start to lose loved ones". Again I felt a stab of indignation:,"Religion may not be true, but never mind that since it may be relied,on for comfort!" How contemptible.

I did once, shivering with fear, take off my flak jacket in Sarajevo and,lend it to an even more frightened woman I was helping escort to a,place of safety (I am not the only one who has been an atheist in a,foxhole). I felt at the time that it was the least I could do for her,as well as the most. The people shelling and sniping were Serbian,Christians, but then, so was she.

One can only shudder to imagine what must have been going on in the,centuries when the Church was above all criticism, but what did people,think was going to happen when the vulnerable were controlled by those,who, misfits and inverts themselves, were required to affirm,hypocritical celibacy?,This reminds me of the joke about the Belfast man who is stopped at a,roadblock and asked his religion. When he answers that he is an,Atheist, he is asked "Protestant or Catholic Atheist?" I think this,shows how the obsession has eroded even the legendary local sense of,humour.

The Vatican, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Chief Sephardic Rabbi,of Israel all took a stand in sympathy with. . . the Ayatollah. So did,the Cardinal Archbishop of New York and other lesser religious figures.

While they usually managed a few words in which to deplore the resort,to violence, all these men stated that the main problem raised by the,publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries but,blasphemy.

It would be great if you [Americans] got onto Question Time and we got a,Written Constitution out of the Exchange. . .

[Obnoxious Phone-In Call] I think that was just a stray Soccer Hooligan,trying to fight his way home through the Beer Halls.

You never meet an Englishman among the underdogs. Except in England, of,course.

The British Committee System is no good and the American Hearings System,is much better.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16,My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.

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.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.

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 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.

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

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.

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

Cheap booze is a false economy.

What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.

th. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

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.

Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.

And 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 rely solely 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.

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?,Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

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.

I am not even an atheist so much as 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 true. . . . There may be people who wish to live their lives under cradle-to-grave divine supervision, a permanent surveillance and monitoring. But I cannot imagine anything more horrible or grotesque.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long. ? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

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,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.

Commentary Column. May 5, 2005],You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion.

We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.

In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.

The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.

The 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.

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearful, partially formed animals with a terror of death and the dark,Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being "not even wrong. " Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.

The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them.

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.

What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.

Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.

Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.

Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.

One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam) in and out of jail. I was to have this experience again, and I hope to have it many more times in the future: it sometimes allows me to feel that life is full of point.

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

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.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.

I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism without ignoring the political dimension. Even if I have failed in this synthesis, I have found the attempt worth making.

Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.

I cannot, of course, prove that there is no supervising deity who invigilates my every momentand who will pursue me even after I am dead. (I can only be happy that there is no evidence forsuch a ghastly idea, which would resemble a celestial North Korea in which liberty was not justimpossible but inconceivable. ) But nor has any theologian ever demonstrated the contrary. Thiswould perhaps make the believer and the doubter equal—except that the believer claims to know,not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actuallyknown. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance andconsiderable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being cantell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate theseterms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity. This tyrannical idea is very much older than P a g e | 5 of 29Christianity, of course, but I do sometimes think that Christians have less excuse for believing, letalone wishing, that such a horrible thing could be true.

the believer claims to know, not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity.

The finest fury is the most controlled.

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he ‘took on,’ and stayed with, and never abandoned. As a consequence, we commonly use the term ‘Orwellian’ in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as ‘Orwellian’ is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as ‘Orwellian’ is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime.

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.

The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.

One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either.

You have to choose your future regrets.

You don’t so much as become an atheist as find out that’s what you are. There’s no moment of conversion. You don’t suddenly think ‘I don’t believe this anymore. ’ You essentially find you don’t believe it.

[T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

The 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.

Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.

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.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary:Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place. ),Beware what you wish for, unless you have the grace to hope that your luck can be shared.

[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.

Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form.

To be charitable, one may admit that the religious often seem unaware of how insulting their main proposition actually is. Exchange views with a believer even for a short time, and let us make the assumption that this is a mild and decent believer who does not open the bidding by telling you that your unbelief will endanger your soul and condemn you to hell. It will not be long until you are politely asked how you can possibly know right from wrong. Without holy awe, what is to prevent you form resorting to theft, murder, rape, and perjury? It will sometimes be conceded that non-believers have led ethical lives, and it will also be conceded (as it had better be) that many believers have been responsible for terrible crimes. Nonetheless, the working assumption is that we should have no moral compass if we were not somehow in thrall to an unalterable and unchallengeable celestial dictatorship. What a repulsive idea!,[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. 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.

We may differ on many things, but what we respect is freeinquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement betweenProfessor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shallresolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.

Yet in our hands and within our view is a whole universe of discovery and clarification, which is a pleasure to study in itself, gives the average person access to insights that not even Darwin or Einstein possessed, and offers the promise of near-miraculous advances in healing, in energy, and in peaceful exchange between different cultures. Yet millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave and the tribe and the blood sacrifice.

The human species – mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns - does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t had this. This has to do with landscape, light, music, love and an awareness of the transience of all things, and the melancholy that invests all this. So it isn’t just gaping happily at the sunset while listening to music, and doing that while knowing that it can’t last very long. But there is no need for the supernatural in this at all. There is no dimension of the supernatural of which this gives one a share.

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

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.

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.

Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.

the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face. What they 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. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson.

To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.

To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.

Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.

I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.

The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.

The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame.

We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.

Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.

The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.

And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies—racism, leader worship, superstition—assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists).

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.

mass indoctrination of uneducated young men with such ideas is in itself a lethal danger to society and to international order.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. 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 provide plenty of time for silence.

If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, 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 shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god. (Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood. ),[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.

Actually, the “leap of faith”—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a “leap” that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the “leap” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn’t in fact rely on “faith” at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected “proofs. ” This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion’s monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are.

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.

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.

[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.

In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me. ” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications. ),Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.

In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.

A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?,Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.

Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well.

How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?,Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

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.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

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.

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.