Unlike other countries, it was founded on written proclamations. America is an ideal as well as a republic. Its documents are open to revisions. They’re works in progress. There’s an invitation to participate.
I’m a single-issue voter, to get straight to the point. I’m really only interested in the candidate who’s toughest and least apologetic when it comes to the confrontation with Islamic Jihadism.
A celebrity is well known for being well known. I’m relatively well known – but for what I’ve written and said, or so I fondly imagine.
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
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.
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.
I’m very depressed how in this country you can be told “That’s offensive” as though those two words constitute an argument.
In one was, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely this reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.
The prince’s official job description as king will be ‘defender of the faith,’ which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths – another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire.
There is a tendency on the left, to think if someone in any way disagrees with the left it must be for the lowest possible reason and if you found the lowest possible motive you have found the right one. Theres this whole culture of no one would leave us or quarrel with us if they weren’t a sellout. It is actually a very sick mentality and very widespread.
Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have ‘ever been threatened’ by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.
I want to live my life taking the risk – all the time – that I don’t know anything like-enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom... Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you.
The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.
The only known cure for poverty is emancipation of women.
The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae.
My hope is that literature can replace religion as the source of our ethics, without ceasing to be a pleasurable study and pursuit in its own right.
Of the numerous regrettable elements that go to make up the unlawful carnal-knowledge industry, I should single out for distinction the look of undisguised contempt that is often worn on the faces of its female staff. Some of the working ‘hostesses’ may have to simulate delight or even interest – itself a pretty cock-shriveling thought – but when these same ladies do the negotiating, they can shrug off the fake charm as a snake discards an unwanted skin.
I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism and liberal secular democracy, even less do I want to engage with those who are incapable of recognizing the basic moral distinction between premeditated mass murder and unintentional killing.
The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.
Don’t take security in the false refuge of consensus.