The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the absurdity of bureaucratic rules in contrast to personal misfortune.
Christopher Hitchens points out the irony and impracticality of societal norms, suggesting that when faced with a serious crime like being mugged, the bureaucratic requirement of identification can become a significant barrier to personal safety and returning to normal life. The remark critiques the way systems can sometimes fail to support individuals in dire situations.
In practice
In a discussion about travel inconveniences, this quote can illustrate the complexities of modern society.
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 β because itβs had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But youβve 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.
The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.
Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.
The synergetic integral of the totality of all principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans--in pure principle--we do not and never will know all the principles
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.
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