You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.
We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From this high ground we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities. We take pride in our short fuses. Our anger elevates, transcends.
Keep away from her,” said Ameer Merchant, but once the inexorable dynamic of the mythic has been set in motion, you might as well try and keep bees from honey, crooks from money, politicians from babies, philosophers from maybes. Vina had her hooks in me, and the consequence was the story of my life.
I must finish what I’ve started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began.
From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence.
Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn’t destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn’t have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he’s how history happens to you.
The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.
In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged.
We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.
Did you know, ji,’ Zulu offered, ’that the map of Tolkien’s Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are right here, in our midst.
This is known, and what is not known does not undermine it. This is the scientific way. To be open about the limits of one’s knowledge increases public confidence in what one says is known.
But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll;.
In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain – hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause – will claim to be great leaders.
You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke.
Our group takes what I’ll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.
This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.
There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.
It did not occur to any of them that their decision was born of a colossal sense of entitlement, this notion that they could just step away from yesterday and start tomorrow as if it wasn’t a part of the same week, to move beyond memory and roots and language and race into the land of the self-made self, which is another way of saying, America.
These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.