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John York

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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick (Goodreads Author)

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Jul 16, 2014 10:24PM

“[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: age, battles, hegel, history, life, reminiscence, self-delusion, self-persuasion, william-morris

13 likes

“When we're deluded, there's a world to escape. When we're aware, there's nothing to escape.”
― Red Pine, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma

tags: awareness, bodhidharma, delusion, emptiness, escapism

12 likes

“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

tags: george-w-bush, god, religion

614 likes

“The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal's champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the New Left Review. However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of 'sexual McCarthyism', an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left