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David Nolan

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David Nolan is currently reading

Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America

by James R. Green

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(page 50 of 400)
— Apr 19, 2025 01:21PM

Apr 19, 2025 01:21PM

“Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

tags: 2001, new-york, september-11-attacks, terrorism, war, war-on-terror, washington-dc

8 likes

“I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism and liberal secular democracy, even less do I want to engage with those who are incapable of recognizing the basic moral distinction between premeditated mass murder and unintentional killing.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

tags: antiwar-movement, collateral-damage, false-equivalence, moral-equivalence, war-on-terror

14 likes

“There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

tags: antiwar-movement, guilt, impotence, iraq-war, leftism, pathology, psychology, self-hatred, war-on-terror

13 likes

“The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

tags: free-thought, independence, partisanship, politics, radicalism

26 likes

“Now, the disposition to be conservative in respect of politics reflects a quite different view of the activity of governing. The man of this disposition understands it to be the business of a government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down. And all this, not because passion is vice and moderation virtue, but because moderation is indispensable if passionate men are to escape being locked in an encounter of mutual frustration.”
― Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and other essays

8 likes

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