Letters to a Young Contrarian | 
Recent acquisitions:
📖 Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
📖 Common Sense by Thomas Paine
#fREADom #UniteAgainstBookBans
6 likes
Recent acquisitions:
📖 Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
📖 Common Sense by Thomas Paine
#fREADom #UniteAgainstBookBans
pickBring a dictionary.
To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or chartered way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.
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.
The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.
"There is only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing." --F.M. Cornford
You can't achieve 100 percent control over humans and, if you could, you could not go on doing so. It is--unfortunately--too much responsibility for any human to assume, not that this keeps the control freaks from continuing to try.
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at. --Oscar Wilde
As so often, the determination of one individual was enough to dishearten those whose courage was mob-derived.
Most people, most of the time, prefer to seek approval or security. This shouldn't surprise us. Nonetheless, there are in all periods people who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not so much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge that debt or not. It's too much to expect to live in an age which is actually propitious for dissent.
"If you stop telling lies about me I'll stop telling the truth about you." (Adlai Stevenson to Richard Nixon)
pickChristopher Hitchens' no holds barred attitude may not be for everyone. He certainly did not suffer fools gladly. I loved this, however. (I was already a fan of his as an orator.) This book will need to be read several times to gain all one can out of it. I'm looking forward to reading more by him.
