There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.
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...
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...
I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.
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?
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 think that people's sexual preferences are a legitimate subject for humour, dirty humour if at all possible.
[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.
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.
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...
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...
You have to choose your future regrets.
Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on ‘our side’. Is it?
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...
A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term we or us without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, de...
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.
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.