I feel very warm towards Mum and Dad for giving us the independence they did. My childhood, and the fact we didn't have a TV, gave me a boundless imagination.

I'm quite convinced in my own mind that those who were arguing that was a more immediate one than some believed - were I'm sure convinced that they were right on fact, I don't think they were making it up. So as to lying, I don't think it has been established that any lies were told.

Christopher Hitchens

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who

Christopher Hitchens

All Americans and freedom-loving people around the world owe President Reagan our deepest gratitude for his strong, principled leadership that ended the Cold War and brought freedom to millions of people.

Jim Ramstad

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

H. L. Mencken

I never mind about the little things when I am focused on the better things

Julie Hardesty

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

Georges Clemenceau

The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?

Hermann Hesse

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Oscar Wilde

I've reduced a lot of the stress in my life. I've gotten rid of a lot of things. The light was turned on and a lot of the cockroaches started spinning. I swept them out the door. And sometimes you just have to throw things out because they carry a certain energy.

Wesley Snipes

The purpose of foreign policy is not to provide an outlet for our own sentiments of hope or indignation; it is to shape real events in a real world.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

George Eliot

The object of the superior man is truth.

Confucius