I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom...
The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.
If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka .
Redemption is promised at the low price of surrender of your critical faculties.
We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child’s social origin with its physical well-being.
Perhaps the values of socialists can only be realized by socialists in a nonsocialist society.
The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for “peace through strength” has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog.
Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed ‘we’ did. Well, does that not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power?
And yet, I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance. I probably ought to carry around some kind of thermometer or other instrument, to keep checking that I am not falling prey to premature curmudgeonhood.
A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.
I’ve been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.
If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.
One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.
People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.
The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.
I don’t think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.
To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.
The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it’s American or British interests involved.
Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.