Hirday

“The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“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

“The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul.”
― Christopher Hitchens