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Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

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Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.

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For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16

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My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And any...more

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Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.

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There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undec...more

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Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Th...more

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The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

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Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you...more

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If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

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I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism without ignoring t...more

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Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous a...more

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The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

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Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority ...more