Christopher Hitchens - Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

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To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.

Christopher Hitchens
Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.

Christopher Hitchens
The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage.

Christopher Hitchens
Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.

Christopher Hitchens
If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.

Christopher Hitchens
Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled...

Christopher Hitchens
Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!

Christopher Hitchens
The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example.

Christopher Hitchens
And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.

Christopher Hitchens
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

Christopher Hitchens
In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.

Christopher Hitchens
I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It's as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.

Christopher Hitchens
A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.

Christopher Hitchens
In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

Christopher Hitchens
When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.

Christopher Hitchens
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

Christopher Hitchens
People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

Christopher Hitchens
Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Christopher Hitchens
Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.

Christopher Hitchens
Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

Christopher Hitchens
It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.

Christopher Hitchens
The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

Christopher Hitchens
I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit.

Christopher Hitchens