1998 Quotes

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“A lot of people say there's a fine line between genius and insanity. I don't think there's a fine line, I actually think there's a yawning gulf. You see some poor bugger scuffling up the road with balloons tied to his ears, he's not going home to invent a rocket, is he?”
― Bill Bailey

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Suppose that we agree that the two atrocities can or may be mentioned in the same breath. Why should we do so? I wrote at the time (The Nation, October 5, 1998) that Osama bin Laden 'hopes to bring a "judgmental" monotheism of his own to bear on these United States.' Chomsky's recent version of this is 'considering the grievances expressed by people of the Middle East region.' In my version, then as now, one confronts an enemy who wishes ill to our society, and also to his own (if impermeable religious despotism is considered an 'ill'). In Chomsky's reading, one must learn to sift through the inevitable propaganda and emotion resulting from the September 11 attacks, and lend an ear to the suppressed and distorted cry for help that comes, not from the victims, but from the perpetrators. I have already said how distasteful I find this attitude. I wonder if even Chomsky would now like to have some of his own words back? Why else should he take such care to quote himself deploring the atrocity? Nobody accused him of not doing so. It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“But where in all of this description is the essential chair? Have we yet come even close to a full description of it? Did we even mention that several hundred years ago, it wasn't a chair but a tree? Where is it now? Here? Or in memory.
We cannot even fully describe a chair and yet we say "I am." "I am...". Understand. There is no "I am." Nothing "is." Try to describe all that you are. Simultaneously discern the logical flaw in what I've just said. Now! Feel the white flame.”
― Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Vol. 4: Bloody Hell in America

“Douglas Adams: The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 millions miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. (Helgoland, 117.)”
― Douglas Adams

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 millions miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
― Douglas Adams

“Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.”
― Wendell Berry, Sabbaths

“I was taken aback by the expression. How, I wondered, could anyone be a premature anti-Fascist? Could there be anything such as a premature antidote to a poison? A premature antiseptic? A premature antitoxin? A premature anti-racist? If you were not premature, what sort of anti-Fascist were you supposed to be? A punctual anti-Fascist? A timely one? In fact, in the '30s, as the European situation moved inexorably toward war, the British and French governments (the French often under pressure from the British) passed up one timely opportunity after another to become anti-Fascist.”
― Bernard Knox

“In 1998, I was using the new Linux operating system on my personal computer with a dial up modem that gave me internet and email, facilitating my search for international jobs.”
― Steven Magee