A Quote by Christopher Hitchens

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity

Christopher Hitchens

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Ally Impossible Must Never People Power Rectitude Tedium Uniformity

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Christopher Hitchens
American - Author
April 13, 1949 - December 15, 2011

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

Saul Bellow

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.

Jack Vance

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

H. L. Mencken

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties

Murray Gell-Mann

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties.

Murray Gell-Mann

When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

We must each walk through life on our own, but we don't have to do it alone. God wants a powerful people. He gives His power to those who are faithful. We have a sacred obligation to seek after the power of God and then to use that power as He directs. And when we have the power of God with us, nothing is impossible.

Sheri L. Dew

We can only restore faith in government if the state itself becomes an efficient, effective and transparent ally of the people. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, abuses of power and the misappropriation of public funds must end.

Victor Ponta

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details, which must be attended to if rules have to be adapted to different men, instead of indiscriminately subjecting all men to the same rule.

Alexis de Tocqueville

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.

David Foster Wallace

Exercise, to qualify at all, must be lonely, painfu, humorless, and boring.

Barbara Holland

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

Lord Acton

Fright is something one can never get over. When a warrior is caught in such a tight spot he would simply turn his back to the ally without thinking twice. A warrior cannot indulge thus he cannot die of fright. A warrior allows the ally to come only when he is good and ready. When he is strong enough to grapple with the ally he opens up his gap and lurches out, grabs the ally, keeps him pinned down and maintains his stare on him for exactly the time he has to, then he moves his eyes away and releases the ally and lets him go. A warrior, my little friend, is the master at all times

Carlos Castaneda

Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas.

John William Draper

The apostles were scattered, and even the leaders of the Church in Jerusalem had neither the power nor the means to impose uniformity.In these circumstances, we must imagine the literature of Christianity as spreading gradually, irregularly, and in a manner which variations inevitable.

Frederic G. Kenyon

...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.

John Piper

A Quote by Christopher Hitchens

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