Quotes.

Quotes out of context are often meaningless, or at the very least rendered vapid, but I still love them, and I love quoting those quotes. So this post will not be an interesting and thought provoking attack on the use of quotes as sound-bites, and their lack of insight, verbatim or otherwise. No. It will be a simple list of some quotes I like, on a variety of different topics.

Christopher Hitchens. An extensive list of excellent quotes could probably be derived just from having a 10-minute conversation with him. I'm paraphrasing from an article written by his friend Martin Amis, that is no longer available on the Guardian's website, that he is a terrifying rhetorician.

Christopher Hitchens speaks the way that I wish I could write. He rails off frighteningly articulate sentences on arbitrary subjects as if he had been practicing them in the mirror for the last five years of his life.

He primarily speaks on the subject of religion. He's an atheist and in fact an anti-theist. At times he is also deliriously right-wing, and that's annoying. But you can't help be taken in by his arguments just from his incredible ability to vocalise them.

“Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”

"That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

I also very much like the following quotes, not from Hitch, and in no order of preference, and no over-riding theme, just some words that I like. Many are lyrics.

"If the crowd gets behind you it means you are facing the wrong way" - Simon Munnery

"The only thing that's left to do is live" - Frank Turner

"True progress means matching the world to the vision in our heads. We always change the vision instead" - Thrice

" 'And we learn, as we age', we've learned nothing, and my body still aches" - Brand New

"A comprehensive study of its causes" - Stewart Lee (his best punch-line)

"'Cause a few mother's sons will never really be enough. Not 'til half of our names are etched out in the wall. And the other half ruined by the things we saw" - Brand New

"If it's still gonna hurt in the morning, and a better plan's yet to get forming, then where's the harm spending an evening in manning the old barricades" - Frank Turner

"So I don't see it like it's us and them
I just see everybody working for that same eternal weekend
Droning on and on and on and never doing what we wanted
Heavy legs two steps behind some forever dangling carrot.

And I'm tired of this
So who's to say that we can't just fucking change it?

And I know it seems dramatic
But I treat it like a crisis
The office to the coffin
All our time and talent wasted
And that weight against your throat
Is that a noose dressed like a necklace?" - Kevin Devine