---
title: "38 History Quotes By Christopher Hitchens"
description: "History quotes by Christopher Hitchens highlight tragedy, power resentment, and materialist views."
image: "https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/bf9/christopher-hitchens-117_fascism_david-irving-is-not-just-a-fascist-histo_2472706.jpg"
---

> [David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/david-irving-is-not-just-a-fascist-historian-he-is-also-a-great/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/bf9/christopher-hitchens-117_fascism_david-irving-is-not-just-a-fascist-histo_2472706.jpg)

> [“History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality tale.”](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/history-is-more-of-a-tragedy-than-it-is-a-morality-tale/)

[christopher hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/859/christopher-hitchens-117_character_history-is-more-of-a-tragedy-than-it-is_113794.jpg)

> [I think the materialist conception of history is valid.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-think-the-materialist-conception-of-history-is-valid/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/9e6/christopher-hitchens-117_conception_i-think-the-materialist-conception-of-hi_1424771.jpg)

> [In modern Greek history, there is a close relationship between national humiliation and political radicalization.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/in-modern-greek-history-there-is-a-close-relationship-between/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/2fc/christopher-hitchens-117_close-relationship_in-modern-greek-history-there-is-a-close_2997693.jpg)

> [One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy 'legacy' is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and "torch-passing"…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/one-of-the-many-dreadful-aspects-of-the-kennedy-legacy-is-the-now/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/461/christopher-hitchens-117_aspect_one-of-the-many-dreadful-aspects-of-the_1350112.jpg)

> [“This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/this-surrender-by-a-man-of-the-enlightenment-and-a-man-of-truly/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a2f/christopher-hitchens-117_buddhism_this-surrender-by-a-man-of-the-enlighten_1935609.jpg)

> [“We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/we-can-always-be-sure-of-one-thing-that-the-messengers-of-discomfort/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/5e8/christopher-hitchens-117_aldous-huxley_we-can-always-be-sure-of-one-thing-that_2927574.jpg)

> [“A consciousness of rectitude can be a terrible thing, and in those days I didn’t just think that I was right: I…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/a-consciousness-of-rectitude-can-be-a-terrible-thing-and-in-those/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/e23/christopher-hitchens-117_history_a-consciousness-of-rectitude-can-be-a-te_1248676.jpg)

> [If anything qualifies as an irony of history it would be this: that Marx and Engels throughout the nineteenth century wrote about…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/if-anything-qualifies-as-an-irony-of-history-it-would-be-this-that/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-search-for-nirvana-like-the-search-for-utopia-or-the-end-of/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a51/christopher-hitchens-117_anxiety_the-search-for-nirvana-like-the-search-f_1422049.jpg)

> [The best blended Scotch in the history of the world - which was also the favourite drink of the Iraqi Baath Party,…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-best-blended-scotch-in-the-history-of-the-world-which-was-also/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/655/christopher-hitchens-117_accepting_the-best-blended-scotch-in-the-history-o_580875.jpg)

> ['WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/wasp-is-the-only-ethnic-term-that-is-in-fact-a-term-of-class-apart/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/ad0/christopher-hitchens-117_class_wasp-is-the-only-ethnic-term-that-is-in_2090416.jpg)

> [Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/every-campaign-garry-wills-once-wrote-taught-nixon-the-same-lesson/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/1f5/christopher-hitchens-117_adoration_every-campaign-garry-wills-once-wrote-ta_194471.jpg)

> [ I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that \[s\]he knew or understood the mind of… ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-have-met-some-highly-intelligent-believers-but-history-has-no/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/b21/christopher-hitchens-117_atheism_i-have-met-some-highly-intelligent-belie_3215841.jpg)

> [“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/many-religions-now-come-before-us-with-ingratiating-smirks-and-2/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/187/christopher-hitchens-117_blasphemy_many-religions-now-come-before-us-with-i_3150562.jpg)

> [We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/we-know-of-no-spectacle-more-ridiculous-or-more-contemptible-than/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/003/christopher-hitchens-117_dare_we-know-of-no-spectacle-more-ridiculous_2741997.jpg)

> [ “\[O\]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life.… ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/o-ne-has-to-have-endured-a-few-decades-before-wanting-let-alone/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/53d/christopher-hitchens-117_age_o-ne-has-to-have-endured-a-few-decades-b_1102939.jpg)

> [“This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/this-historic-general-election-which-showed-that-the-british-are-well/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/355/christopher-hitchens-117_britain_this-historic-general-election-which-sho_382931.jpg)

> [“It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-is-strange-a-judicious-reader-is-apt-to-say-upon-the-perusal-of/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/now-is-as-good-a-time-as-ever-to-revisit-the-history-of-the-crusades/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/those-of-us-who-write-and-study-history-are-accustomed-to-its/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-is-truth-in-the-old-saying-that-is-the-daughter-of-time-and-the/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/if-one-could-nominate-an-absolutely-tragic-day-in-human-history-it/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/since-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-in-1989-historians-have-become-both/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/d82/christopher-hitchens-117_1989_since-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-in-198_1886778.jpg)

> [“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/very-often-the-test-of-one-s-allegiance-to-a-cause-or-to-a-people-is/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“The fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It's not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-fervor-and-single-mindedness-of-this-deification-probably-have-no/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/long-before-it-was-known-to-me-as-a-place-where-my-ancestry-was-even/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/e10/christopher-hitchens-117_19th-century_long-before-it-was-known-to-me-as-a-plac_1968305.jpg)

> [“It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-can-certainly-be-misleading-to-take-the-attributes-of-a-movement/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/867/christopher-hitchens-117_2011_it-can-certainly-be-misleading-to-take-t_61390.jpg)

> [“During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/during-the-1992-election-i-concluded-as-early-as-my-first-visit-to/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/01b/christopher-hitchens-117_1992_during-the-1992-election-i-concluded-as_2881035.jpg)

> [“Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/suppose-that-a-man-leaps-out-of-a-burning-building-as-my-dear-friend/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“Sir Steven Runciman, whose history of the Crusades is an imperishable work, because it demonstrates that medieval Christian fundamentalism not only constituted…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/sir-steven-runciman-whose-history-of-the-crusades-is-an-imperishable/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/2e9/christopher-hitchens-117_crusades_sir-steven-runciman-whose-history-of-the_2828668.jpg)

> [Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/religion-is-part-of-the-human-make-up-it-s-also-part-of-our-cultural/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/538/christopher-hitchens-117_believe_religion-is-part-of-the-human-make-up-it_3135454.jpg)

> [“I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is:…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-have-had-my-mother-s-wing-of-my-genetic-ancestry-analyzed-by-the/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/12e/christopher-hitchens-117_africa_i-have-had-my-mother-s-wing-of-my-geneti_721228.jpg)

> [ “\[R\]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at… ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/r-eligion-was-the-race-s-first-and-worst-attempt-to-make-sense-of/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“suppose, that all the historians who treat of England, should agree, that, on the first of January 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; that…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/suppose-that-all-the-historians-who-treat-of-england-should-agree/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/0cd/christopher-hitchens-117_history_suppose-that-all-the-historians-who-trea_3033005.jpg)

> [“And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews.…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/and-thus-to-my-final-and-most-melancholy-point-a-great-number-of/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/703/christopher-hitchens-117_antisemitism_and-thus-to-my-final-and-most-melancholy_3117755.jpg)

> [“I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-regard-anti-semitism-as-ineradicable-and-as-one-element-of-the/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/8d9/christopher-hitchens-117_american-jews_i-regard-anti-semitism-as-ineradicable-a_2531477.jpg)

> [“Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/attempts-to-locate-oneself-within-history-are-as-natural-and-as/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/911/christopher-hitchens-117_albania_attempts-to-locate-oneself-within-histor_1549180.jpg)

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## More by Christopher Hitchens

> [“The spirit of our accurate and exact philosophy is outraged by conclusions that contradict each other so glaringly.”](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-spirit-of-our-accurate-and-exact-philosophy-is-outraged-by/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [“Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/many-governments-employ-torture-but-this-was-the-first-time-that-the/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [ It's \[Los Angeles\] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them… ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-s-los-angeles-mostly-full-of-nonsense-and-delusion-and-egomania/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/to-be-against-rationalization-is-not-the-same-as-to-be-opposed-to/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [ \[Religion\] attacks us in our deepest integrity - the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we… ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/religion-attacks-us-in-our-deepest-integrity-the-core-of-our-self/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [“In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or,…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/in-the-very-recent-past-we-have-seen-the-church-of-rome-befouled-by/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-s-surprising-to-me-how-many-of-my-friends-send-christmas-cards-or/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/suppose-there-were-groups-of-secularists-at-hospitals-who-went-round/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/there-are-after-all-atheists-who-say-they-wish-the-fable-were-true/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [“It isn’t so long since a test of Anglican orthodoxy was applied to anyone seeking to study or teach at Oxford and Cambridge universities.…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-isn-t-so-long-since-a-test-of-anglican-orthodoxy-was-applied-to/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/gullibility-and-credulity-are-considered-undesireable-qualities-in/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [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…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-s-much-worse-to-see-a-woman-drunk-than-a-man-i-don-t-know-quite/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-s-true-that-obscenity-is-a-matter-of-taste-and-in-the-eye-of-the/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [I worked out early on to give up things I couldn't do well at all.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-worked-out-early-on-to-give-up-things-i-couldn-t-do-well-at-all/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that - or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/writing-is-what-s-important-to-me-and-anything-that-helps-me-do-that/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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                        "text": "“This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale”",
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                        "text": "“We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.”",
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                        "text": "“A consciousness of rectitude can be a terrible thing, and in those days I didn’t just think that I was right: I thought that “we” (our group of International Socialists in particular) were being damn well proved right. If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.”",
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                        "text": "If anything qualifies as an irony of history it would be this: that Marx and Engels throughout the nineteenth century wrote about America the United States as the great country of the future, of freedom and equality and a good life for the working man, and a country of revolution and emancipation, and of Russia as the great country of despotism, backwardness, savagery and superstition.",
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                        "text": "The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.",
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                        "text": "'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.",
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                        "text": "I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.",
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                        "text": "“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse. And if we chance to forget what that must have been like, we have only to look at those states and societies where the clergy still has the power to dictate its own terms. The pathetic vestiges of this can still be seen, in modern societies, in the efforts made by religion to secure control over education, or to exempt itself from tax, or to pass laws forbidding people to insult its omnipotent and omniscient deity, or even his prophet.”",
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                        "text": "We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.",
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                        "text": "“[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind.”",
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                        "text": "“This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.”",
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                        "text": "“It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages. You must surely have seen instances enough of that frailty. You have yourself heard many such marvellous relations started, which, being treated with scorn by all the wise and judicious, have at last been abandoned even by the vulgar. Be assured, that those renowned lies, which have spread and flourished to such a monstrous height, arose from like beginnings; but being sown in a more proper soil, shot up at last into prodigies almost equal to those which they relate.”",
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                        "text": "“Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content.”",
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                        "text": "Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.",
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                        "text": "“It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.”",
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                        "text": "“If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.”",
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                        "text": "“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”",
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                        "text": "“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 tundra 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 had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”",
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                        "text": "“The fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It's not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch to the son and heir. It surpasses anything I have read about the Roman or Babylonian or even Pharaonic excesses. An estimated $2.68 billion was spent on ceremonies and monuments in the aftermath of Kim Il Sung's death. The concept is not that his son is his successor, but that his son is his reincarnation . North Korea has an equivalent of Mount Fuji—a mountain sacred to all Koreans. It's called Mount Paekdu, a beautiful peak with a deep blue lake, on the Chinese border. Here, according to the new mythology, Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, 1942. His birth was attended by a double rainbow and by songs of praise (in human voice) uttered by the local birds. In fact, in February 1942 his father and mother were hiding under Stalin's protection in the dank Russian city of Khabarovsk, but as with all miraculous births it's considered best not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.”",
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                        "text": "“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century , on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”",
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                        "text": "“It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like 'Stalinism,' say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.”",
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                        "text": "“During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.”",
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                        "text": "“Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.”",
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                        "text": "“Sir Steven Runciman, whose history of the Crusades is an imperishable work, because it demonstrates that medieval Christian fundamentalism not only constituted a menace to Islamic civilization but also directly resulted in the sack of Byzantium, the retardation of Europe, and the massacre of the Jews.”",
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                        "text": "Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.",
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                        "text": "“I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth. I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less… deterministic.”",
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                        "text": "“[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again.”",
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                        "text": "“suppose, that all the historians who treat of England, should agree, that, on the first of January 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; that both before and after her death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual with persons of her rank; that her successor was acknowledged and proclaimed by the parliament; and that, after being interred a month, she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three years: I must confess that I should be surprised at the concurrence of so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event. I should not doubt of her pretended death, and of those other public circumstances that followed it: I should only assert it to have been pretended, and that it neither was, nor possibly could be real. You would in vain object to me the difficulty, and almost impossibility of deceiving the world in an affair of such consequence; the wisdom and solid judgment of that renowned queen; with the little or no advantage which she could reap from so poor an artifice: All this might astonish me; but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature. 38 But should this miracle be ascribed to any new system of religion; men, in all ages, have been so much imposed on by ridiculous stories of that kind, that this very circumstance would be a full proof of a cheat, and sufficient, with all men of sense, not only to make them reject the fact, but even reject it without farther examination. Though the Being to whom the miracle is ascribed, be, in this case, Almighty, it does not, upon that account, become a whit more probable; since it is impossible for us to know the attributes or actions of such a Being, otherwise than from the experience which we have of his productions, in the usual course of nature. This still reduces us to past observation, and obliges us to compare the instances of the violation of truth in the testimony of men, with those of the violation of the laws of nature by miracles, in order to judge which of them is most likely and probable. As the violations of truth are more common in the testimony concerning religious miracles, than in that concerning any other matter of fact; this must diminish very much the authority of the former testimony, and make us form a general resolution, never to lend any attention to it, with whatever specious pretence it may be covered. 39 Lord Bacon seems to have embraced the same principles of reasoning. “We ought,” says he, “to make a collection or particular history of all monsters and prodigious births or productions, and in a word of every thing new, rare, and extraordinary in nature. But this must be done with the most severe scrutiny, lest we depart from truth. Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.”",
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                        "text": "“And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.”",
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                        "text": "“I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry did settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history.”",
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                        "text": "“Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' (' Can't '?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man! Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.”",
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