I still think like a Marxist in many ways.
Interpretation
The speaker identifies with Marxist ideas while possibly critiquing or evolving those beliefs.
Christopher Hitchens' quote reflects a continued allegiance to Marxist thought, suggesting that even as one grows and encounters new ideas, foundational beliefs can persist. This resonates with the complex nature of ideology, where past influences may inform current perspectives while allowing room for critique and intellectual development.
In practice
In a lecture on political theory, one could use this quote to illustrate the complexity of personal ideology.
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.
Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.
Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.
The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
June suns, you cannot store them To warm the winter's cold, The lad that hopes for heaven Shall fill his mouth with mould.
Everywhere is the center of the world. Everything is sacred.
For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time.
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