[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
Interpretation
Denial often leads to attempts to justify one's beliefs or actions.
In this quote, Christopher Hitchens highlights the psychological process where individuals first deny an uncomfortable truth, which subsequently prompts them to create justifications for their denial. This reflects a common human tendency to avoid facing the reality of a situation, leading to rationalizations that may not hold true upon closer scrutiny.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion about cognitive biases, this quote could illustrate how people often cope with uncomfortable truths.
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.
They can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.
It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest', but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.
Happy ending are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.
Jesus was not sent here to teach the people to build magnificent churches and temples amidst the cold wretched huts and dismal hovels. He came to make the human heart a temple, and the soul an altar, and the mind a priest.
Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.
My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.
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