I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.
The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on ‘our side’. Is it?
One of my first reservations about Zionism was and is that, semiconsciously at least, it grants the anti-Semite's first premise about the abnormality of the Jew.
When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.
[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that s...
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.
How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather th...
[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.
On page 605, Blumenthal says that 'I made friends with Hitchens's friends the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.' True in its way. I particularly remember the occasion when he called me up and...
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and...
An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.'...
I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.
Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skeptic...
Very often, people embarking on such guesswork make the vulgar assumption that the lower the motives, the more likely they are to be authentic.
The hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more ac...
If only religion an opiate. No known narcotic rots the brain so fast.