“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against
any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time.
And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.”
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide
what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.
The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine
during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise
austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on
the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated.
No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected
to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam,
rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value
of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was
delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping
it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and
bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir