The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.
— Christopher Hitchens
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.
I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.
Chemotherapy isn't good for you.
I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.
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.
I'm not a sheep.
People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
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 Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.
My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.
I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.
I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.
You can only have one aim per debate.
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.
I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.
Obscenity comes from grime.
Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.
The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.
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 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.
I like surprises.
I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.
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.
Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.
There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.
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.
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.
Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.
I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.
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.
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.
Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.
I'm crepuscular.
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.
I don't consider myself to be that credulous.
The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.
For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.
I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.
If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.
I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.
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.
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.
Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.
I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.
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.
