The Infinite Library

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

“Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.”

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”

“I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.”

“My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it.”

“I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.”

“Littera scripta manet - 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.”

“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.”

“A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it's employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.”

“George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.”

“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.”

“The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.”

“The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.”

“Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'”

“Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.”

“I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.”

“The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.”

“When Caroline Kennedy managed to say 'you know' more than 200 times in an interview with the New York 'Daily News,' and on 130 occasions while talking to 'The New York Times' during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class.”

“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.”

“The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.”

“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”

“The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.”

“There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.”

“You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.”

“Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.”

“Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.”

“I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.”

“It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.”

“I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.”

“When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.”

“When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early.”

“A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.”

“The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.”

“The citizens of Tumortown are forever assailed with cures and rumors of cures.”

“Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.”

“I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.”

“The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.”

“The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.”

“Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.”

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”

“Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.”

“I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, 'He is not a lush.' That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, 'Look!'”

“Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.”

“You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?”

“We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'.”

“Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,' so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of 'like' are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.”

“You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.”

“Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been speakers and writers who embody Einstein's injunction to 'remember your humanity and forget the rest.' It would be immodest to claim membership in this fraternity/sorority, but I hope not to have done anything to outrage it. Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are 'fashionable,' it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.”