Michael Quinn

“I kept a picture of me kissing my dad’s corpse on the forehead in my wallet for years. I’d break it out any time someone showed me a baby picture, just so they would know how it ends.”
― Doug Stanhope, Digging Up Mother: A Love Story

“Be ... suspicious ... of all those who employ the term 'we' or 'us' without your permission. This is [a] form of surreptitious conscription ... Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

“It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs