Tim > Tim's Quotes

“There is a tendency on the left, to think if someone in any way disagrees with the left it must be for the lowest possible reason and if you found the lowest possible motive you have found the right one. Theres this whole culture of no one would leave us or quarrel with us if they weren't a sellout. It is actually a very sick mentality and very widespread.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Your capacity to be offended isn't something that I or anyone else needs to respect. It isn't something that you should respect. In fact, it's something you should be on your guard for.”
― Sam Harris

“Many principles of psychology can be mistaken as reasons to avoid responsibility for one's mental state and behavior. You must unlearn this perception and understand that you have the responsibility and the ability to respond to yourself and your environment correctly.”
― Gal Shapira

“The Pyramids of Giza were made under coercion from the evil Pharaohs who were not very woke. I think we can all agree they should be torn down immediately.”
― Sean Lennon

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Here's to the good nuns for telling me what books NOT to read!”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,' as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you really don't remember, that's an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won't be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“And do you think that unto such as you
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew
God gave a secret, and denied it me?
Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too!”
― Omar Khayyâm, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

“If you give me a choice between a community of people who believe the same things I believe and one that believes very different things than I do, I'm going to choose the latter because the former is the end of growth.”
― Bret Weinstein

“Every now and then when I hear someone called a racist, I just mentally insert the word 'witch'. And it almost always works. What they're actually doing is they're calling you a witch.”
― Glenn Loury

“I object to the soft tyranny of having political postures put forward as self-evident truths to which every decent member of this community should subscribe. I object to that.”
― Glenn Loury

“There are many disparities, and for every disparity, there are alternative explanations that one can bring to bear, but structural racism doesn’t even attempt to provide an explanation. It attempts to maneuver you into a corner rhetorically so that you must concede it’s not the fault of the people who suffered the condition at hand.”
― Glenn Loury

“One of the ancient and modern critiques of democracy is that radicals destroy norms for short-term political gain, norms that they themselves often later seek as refuge.”
― Victor Davis Hanson

“The war no longer pits radicals against conservatives, but often socialists and anarchists against both liberals and conservatives.”
― Victor Davis Hanson

“PC culture isn’t killing comedy, it’s driving it. As it always did.”
― Ricky Gervais

“When you're in war, you don't have to be perfect to be good, you just have to be 51% better than the enemy if you want a moral edge. We in the West have this Utopian idea that we have to be 99.9% good, and if we're not, then we're no damned good. And the enemy knows that.”
― Victor Davis Hanson

“Even God couldn't make a garden without a snake in it.”
― Jordan Peterson

“People who love their enemies should, at least, tell the truth about their friends.”
― Robert Ingersoll

“If you use the language rules that your ideological opponent demands that you use, you cede the territory to them.”
― Jordan Peterson

“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.”
― Thomas Sowell

“This is the age of the complaining classes, whether they are lawyers, community activists, radical feminists, race hustlers, or other squeaking wheels looking for oil. No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.”
― Thomas Sowell

“In point of fact, the racism on the campuses is greater than that in the larger society in many campuses. And what I worry about is that they're going to graduate into the general society, blacks and whites alike, who hate each other's guts and who will be the new leaders of new racial strife for the future." (ca.1990)”
― Thomas Sowell

“One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.”
― Klaus Kinski

“If everybody's conversations were recorded, would anyone have a job on Monday?”
― Bill Burr

“A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force.”
― Sam Harris

“I’m not saying that you won’t find many patterns or practices of racial mistreatment in history, but I’m saying that the link between them and the contemporary circumstances of African-American communities, especially at the bottom end, is woefully inadequate to explain what we see.”
― Glenn Loury

“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Merely being offended, or worried, isn't a counter-argument. It isn't a deep reason not to think about something or discover whether or not something is true or useful.”
― Sam Harris