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#1

“MT [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.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: birth-control, empowerment-of-women, mother-teresa, poverty, poverty-alleviation

473 likes

#2

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

tags: rational-thought, science

1072 likes

#3

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

tags: critical-thinking, independent-thought, opinions, skepticism, thinking

868 likes

#4

“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. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: alcohol, ancient-greeks, atheism, boredom, brotherhood, cana, christianity, entheos, food, hellenism, inspiration, iran, judaea, marriage-at-cana, miracles, mullahs, new-testament, omar-khayyam, oxford, passover, passover-seder, plato, reading, religion, symposia, wine, writing

245 likes

#5

“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: atheism, daughters, death, fatherhood, fathers, god, mortality, religion, yeats

317 likes

#6

“If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: death, religion

111 likes

#7

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: freedom-of-speech, humor

430 likes

#8

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: atheism, history, religion

70 likes

#9

“Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,' as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you really don't remember, that's an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won't be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: adorno, advice, alcoholism, alochol, drinking, drowning-one-s-sorrows, drugs, drunk-driving, eating, food, hangovers, martin-amis, men, responsibility, rules, scotch, single-malt, whiskey, women

164 likes

#10

“She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: charisma, pornography, sarah-palin, sex-appeal

71 likes

#11

“The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

tags: anxiety, class, irrationality, nirvana, reason, society, struggle, utopia

102 likes

#12

“Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

tags: argumentation, debate

154 likes

#13

“There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

tags: argument, confrontation, progress

105 likes

#14

“The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: humor, literature, postmodernism

49 likes

#15

“In one was, 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. But for precisely this reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”
― Christopher Hitchens

50 likes

#16

“The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: embarrassment, humanity, isolation, love

27 likes

#17

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

492 likes

#18

“Love without sacrifice is like theft”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

tags: compromise, love, manipulation, marriage, marriage-advice, narcissism, narcissists, passive-aggressive, passive-aggressiveness, real-love, relationships, sacrifice, true-love

427 likes

#19

“Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

tags: charm, enfp-vs-intj, flirting, game, nerd, nerdiness, nerds, seduction

309 likes

#20

“Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

tags: femininity, liars, manipulation, men-and-women, narcissism, narcissists, politicians, politics, preachers, sociopathology, sociopaths, women

288 likes

#21

“Remember that you are a Black Swan.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

135 likes

#22

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

tags: book, books, library, reading

84 likes

#23

“My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

tags: business-ethics, corruption, court-system, courts, ethical-behaviour, ethics, governement, government, law, law-and-order, lawyers, modern-life, modern-society, modernity, modernity-is-a-sickness, the-supreme-court

78 likes

#24

“What I learned on my own I still remember”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

tags: academia, discovery, education, intelligence, learning, reading, schooling, thinking, thought

221 likes

#25

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

tags: addiction, carbohydrates, diabesity, dr-hyman, dr-robert-lustig, labor, laboring-class, sugar, sugar-addiction, sugar-the-bitter-truth, wage, wage-slavery

679 likes

#26

“Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

tags: fact

23 likes

#27

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

tags: art, autism, humor, intelligence, nerd, nerds, sense-of-humor, wisdom, wisdom-vs-nerdiness, wit

161 likes

#28

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

tags: courage, creativity, empowerment, independence, inspirational-stories, self-confidence, self-realization

4362 likes

#29

“The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.”
― Arthur Koestler

tags: creativity

130 likes

#30

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

tags: confidence

1654 likes

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