What the above examples reveal is not a man prone to the faux pas, but a gentleman—strictly defined, by Hitchens, as someone who is never rude except on purpose. A spectacular instance of his gentlema...
. . If you really care about a serious cause or a deep subject, you may have to be prepared to be boring about it. [Letters to a Young Contrarian (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 122]
The contrarian dogma is simple and easy to understand: Whatever is popular is wrong, as Oscar Wilde proclaimed at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
One of the most idiotic jeers against animal lovers is the one about their preferring critters to people. As a matter of observation, it will be found that people who ‘care’—about rain forests or anim...