Letters to a Young Contrarian

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about being right, not being in the crowd etc. It is advice on how to stay true to the principles. The letters are thoughtful and engaging.

🎨 Impressions

I quite liked it, it felt like a good book to read from time to time.

How I Discovered It

From the Hitchens archive.

Who Should Read It?

People who like Hitchens.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to highlight the complexity of topics when people are looking for a simple solution. But it is the duty of intellectuals to say that sometimes it is simple, and that is the most important duty.

I finish with some of Hitchens's quotes, which, of course, says it in a more elegant way than I ever can.

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
"I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness. "

✍️ My Top Quotes

At the direct request of the Vatican, I was invited to give evidence for the opposing side in the hearings on Mother Teresa’s impending canonisation. It was an astonishing opportunity to play Devil’s Advocate in the literal sense, and I must say that the Church behaved with infinitely more care and scruple than my liberal critics. A closed room, a Bible, a tape-recorder, a Monsignor, a Deacon and a Father—a solemn exercise in deposition, where I was encouraged to produce all my findings and opinions. I’ll tell you all about it at another time; the point is that the record is not now the monopoly of the fundamentalists.
Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: “If you stop telling lies about me I’ll stop telling the truth about you.”
The term “intellectual” was originally coined by those in France who believed in the guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. They thought that they were defending an organic, harmonious and ordered society against nihilism, and they deployed this contemptuous word against those they regarded as the diseased, the introspective, the disloyal and the unsound.
There is a saying from Roman antiquity: Fiat justitia—ruat caelum. “Do justice, and let the skies fall.”
Galileo himself, as he finished his recantation, may or may not have murmured, “epur si muove”—“It still does move.”
This would be idiocy in its pejorative sense; the Athenians originally employed the term more lightly, defining as idiotis any man who was blandly indifferent to public affairs.
Sigmund Freud’s memorial in Vienna appear the words: “The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.”
Santayana’s definition of the fanatic, they redouble their efforts just when they have lost sight of their ends.
A truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent
Santiago Alvarez, the grand old man of Cuban cinema. Film was the special medium of the Cuban revolution and he assured us that it was unfettered. Completely unfettered? Well, he said with a slight laugh, there is one thing that is not done. No satirical portrayal of the Leader will be permitted. (The slight laugh was at the very idea that anyone would even dream of proposing such a thing.) I said, quite simply, that if the main subject of Castro was off-limits then, in effect, there could be no real satire or criticism at all. I had heard and read of the term “counterrevolutionary,” but this was the first time I heard it applied in all seriousness—and to myself, at that.
But, as Laplace is supposed to have said when demonstrating his model of the solar system at court, and on being asked where the Prime Mover was: “It can work without that assumption.”
As the great Eugene Debs used to tell his socialist voters in the 1912 election campaign, he would not lead them into a Promised Land even if he could, because if they were trusting enough to be led in, they would be trusting enough to be led out again.
Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile, “But, Yossarian, what if everyone felt that way?” “Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”
Camus observed that if compelled to choose between Justice and his mother, he might well have to pick his mother.
Beware of identity politics. I’ll re-phrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying “The Personal Is Political.”
It is told of Freud that when he was trapped in Vienna by the Anschluss, he asked the Nazis for a safe-conduct to leave. They granted this on condition that he signed a statement saying that he had been well-treated. He asked for permission to add an extra sentence and to their delighted surprise wrote: “I can thoroughly recommend the Gestapo to anybody.”
The rebel, he says, secretly quite wants the world and the system to remain as it is. Its permanence, after all, is the guarantee of his continuing ability to “rebel.” The revolutionary, in contrast, really wishes to overthrow and replace existing conditions. The second enterprise is obviously no laughing matter.
Dante was a sectarian and a mystic but he was right to reserve one of the fieriest corners of his inferno for those who, in a time of moral crisis, try to stay neutral.
To train the condemnation upon the Utopians is to miss the historical point (the point made in Animal Farm, among other places) that Utopians become tyrants when they start to emulate their former masters
An official of the Teamsters’ Union, asked by a Senate hearing if his union was really powerful, responded guardedly but elegantly by saying that being powerful was a little like being ladylike: “If you have to say you are, you prob’ly ain’t.”