A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'.
Interpretation
Life gains meaning through connections and experiences with others and engagement in meaningful struggles.
Christopher Hitchens emphasizes that a life enriched by relationships, creativity, and the pursuit of justice holds intrinsic value. He suggests that the contributions we make through love, friendship, humor, and activism are what make our existence meaningful, illustrating that it is the richness of our experiences and connections with others that define our lives.
In practice
Inspirational speech at a graduation ceremony.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
What is perceptible to one’s mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings.
Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.
International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn't pay his protection money. You have to have obedience; otherwise, the idea can spread that you don't have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.
The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good.
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