"My own view is that this planet is used as a penal
colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get
rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it
either." – Christopher Hitchens, who has passed from this sphere into
whatever corpus formus in which he believed or, more likely, disbelieved.
On
politicians and royalty:
On Donald Trump: " a ludicrous figure, but at least he’s worked out how to cover 90 per cent of his skull with 30 per cent of his hair."
On Donald Trump: " a ludicrous figure, but at least he’s worked out how to cover 90 per cent of his skull with 30 per cent of his hair."
"Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer
do to his wife."
"(George W Bush) is lucky to be governor of Texas. He
is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate,
fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite
proud of all these things."
Bill Clinton: a "habitual and professional liar."
On Sarah Palin: "I think she's a completely
straightforward cynic and opportunist and I think she's cashing out... She's
made a fortune and she'll make another. But she's not actually going to do the
hard work of trying to lead or build a movement."
On Jerry Falwell: “If [Falwell] had been given an enema, he could have been buried in a matchbox.”
"Prince Charles, subjected to a regime of fierce
paternal harangues and penitential cold-shower boarding schools, withdrew into
himself, was eventually talked into a calamitous marriage with someone he
didn't love or respect, and is now the morose, balding, New Age crank and
licensed busybody that we flinch from today."
On the royal wedding: "I suppose this must be the
monarchical 'magic' of which we hear so much: by some mystic alchemy, the
breeding imperatives for a dynasty become the stuff of romance, even
'fairytale'."
Advice to Kate Middleton: "If you really love him,
honey, get him out of there, and yourself, too. Many of us don't want or need
another sacrificial lamb to water the dried bones and veins of a dessicated
system. Do yourself a favour and save what you can: leave the throne to the
awful next incumbent that the hereditary principle has mandated for it."
On
that “lying, thieving Albanian dwarf”, Mother Theresa
“[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.”
On
Writing: "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."
On
Drinking and Other Vices:
"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."
"At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr
Walker's amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system)
and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but
never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the
evening meal. No 'after-dinner drinks' - most especially nothing sweet and
never, ever any brandy. 'Nightcaps' depend on how well the day went..."
"The four most over-rated things in life are
champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics."
"Nothing optional - from homosexuality to adultery -
is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the
fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."
"The one unforgivable sin is to be boring."
On Iraq and Afghanistan: "Will an Iraq war make our al-Qaeda problem worse? Not
likely."
"The death toll is not nearly high enough... too many
[jihadists] have escaped."
"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."
(On Afghanistan) "I will venture a prediction. The
Taliban/al-Qaeda riffraff, as we know them, will never come back to
power."
"If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then
there is no such thing as torture."
On Faith, Religion and Science
"(The New Testament) is a work of crude carpentry,
hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised
attempts to make things come out right."
"Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot
agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did."
“ To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is
to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.”
“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.”
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part
of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at
literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we
are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith
healing, our first attempt at philosophy.
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.
"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed
without evidence."
"One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the
period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who
concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was
going on."
"Everything about Christianity is contained in the
pathetic image of 'the flock'."
Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and
abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.
George
Orwell and other heroes:
"North Korea is a country that still might give us a
lot of trouble and it is, believe me, it is exactly like a 1984 state, it is as
if it was modelled on 1984, rather than 1984 on it. It is extraordinary, the
leader worship, the terror, the uniformity, the misery, the squalor. And in
Zimbabwe recently, the opposition press reprinted Animal Farm as a satire on
Mugabe and that's also, that for us in this country it's not a small example,
it's an important one."
Orwell was in a certain way, incorruptible, a lot of people
are honest in one way, say intellectually, then they get a little bit shady on
the other and it compromises them... the idea of him becoming... a sell out...
runs counter to everything we know about him as a person and a writer."
"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."
Reflections
on life:
"History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality
tale."
"A life that partakes even a little of friendship,
love, irony, humour, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take
part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'
except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it
so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact
possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so."
"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases
that's where it should stay."
"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."
"Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and -
since there is no other metaphor - also the soul."
On
cancer and dying:
On living with cancer: "It's a malady like any other and
it will yield to reason and science. (Battling cancer) is a subversion of the
pathetic fallacy. I rather think it's battling me, it's much more what it feels
like. I have to sit passively every few weeks and have a huge dose of
kill-or-cure venom put straight into my veins... It doesn't feel like fighting
at all, possibly resisting. You feel as if you're drowning in passivity... I
prefer resistance to battling."
"Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another... it
has given me a more vivid idea of what makes life worth living, and
defending."
"My main fear is of being incapacitated or imbecilic
at the end. It's not something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified
of."
"I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a
lovely light."
Hitchens on his fight with religion.
10 times Hitch nailed it.
Closing remarks on creationsism vs William Dembski - 2010
1 comment:
I am painfully aware of the fact that most of us are afraid of revealing our true feelings on some of these important issues. I must agree I am in that bunch of people! The fear is real, it is not just a shield! Noone wants to be banished of this life on earth! I may have spoken too much, too soon!!
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