Jesse Bare

“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.” Mr. Hitchens isn’t like that. Christopher and His Kind runs the title of one of Isherwood’s famous memoirs. And yet this Christopher doesn’t have a kind. Everyone is unique—but Christopher is preternatural. And it may even be that he exactly inverts the Nabokovian paradigm. He thinks like a child (that is to say, his judgments are far more instinctive and moral-visceral than they seem, and are animated by a child’s eager apprehension of what feels just and true); he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius. As a result, Christopher is one of the most terrifying rhetoricians that the world has yet seen. Lenin used to boast that his objective, in debate, was not rebuttal and then refutation: it was the “destruction” of his interlocutor. This isn’t Christopher’s policy—but it is his practice.”
― Windsor Mann, The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism—The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“Bush once appointed an attorney general, John Ashcroft, who knew so little about the United States Constitution that he announced that, in America, ‘we have no king but Jesus.’ That moronic statement was exactly two words too long.”
― Windsor Mann, The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism—The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“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.”
― Windsor Mann, The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism—The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“I turned on the television, using the remote, though the room was so narrow I sat two feet away from the small screen. I settled on a Berenstain Bears cartoon dubbed in Finnish. It was impressive how closely the mouth movements of the Bears seemed to match the dubbed words. Finnish, apparently, was the Bears’ native language.”
― Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel