top of page
.png){kind=small}
"It was well said-by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think-that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Suffering quotes
"After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped."
"Suffering is an essential component of life. No person escapes suffering, which is indivisible from life itself. Suffering is what places in in contact with the self; it is what allows us to understand the spiritual nature behind our existence."
"This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then he would remain..."
"It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful... it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself."
"The unavoidable has touched the life of every human being on the face of the earth. Some have rebounded, others have given up--but all of us have felt the wings of tragedy brushing against us."
"The happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering from positive evil."
Explore more quotes by Christopher Hitchens
"What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?"
"Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine-some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone-but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him."
"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."
"It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse."
"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."
"Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen."
"Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11:Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts...') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political."
"A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?"
"And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies-racism, leader worship, superstition-assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists)."
bottom of page