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"Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact."
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"Why is it that none of the things I construct ever make me feel safe? The answer lies in the fact that safety can't be created. It can only be found. And the only thing I've found that's never been created is God."
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Personal Development
"F.B.I and C.I.A use coded words.... Don't be stupid, remove everything which shows the location. Good Luck Killer :)!"
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Personal Development
"Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse."
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Personal Development
"So life isn't exciting?" continued Gary. "Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight. I'll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?" He turned and looked at Richard.Richard nodded, hesitantly. "Yeah."
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Personal Development
"Weaponry is a fear-raising idea."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact."
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Personal Development
"Your shield must surpass your weaponry."
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Personal Development
"No one from the beginning of time has had security."
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Personal Development
"Security is a double-edged sword: While a fence sure protects the fenced, it also imprisons the protected."
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Personal Development
"Not only is privatizing Social Security not the solution to Social Security, it would exacerbate the problem."
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Personal Development
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"Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope-and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing-that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so."
Writing
"Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries."
Reflection
"One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either."
Integrity
"The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies."
Philosophy
"My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them."
Faith
"The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them."
Politics
"Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence."
Mind
"In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust."
Philosophy
"There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it."
Truth
"The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book."
Philosophy
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