A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.
Christopher Hitchens
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.
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.
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
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 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.
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.
To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'
I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.
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.
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.
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.
I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.
I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
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 used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.
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.
It doesn't take much to make me angry.
'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.
To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.
To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
I'm crepuscular.
The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.
All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.
You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.
I'm not a sheep.
It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
Littera scripta manet - 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.
Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.
I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.
Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'
It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.
For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts.
The violence in the Bible is appalling.
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.
Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.
The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.
You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.
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.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.
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.
