The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as ‘Fat Man and Little Boy.’) And a river...

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression ‘killing time.’ It’s a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment,...

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the...

I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for...

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

You don’t say ‘they all do it’ unless you know you’ve been doing it too.

a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which...

The Postmodernists’ tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes...

I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.

The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that’s what you get if...

However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I...

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus....

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view...

Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a ‘first generation’ of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped...

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp (partly because I was far...

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like ‘a plantation,’ adding in a...

I have had my mother’s wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way...

On page 607, alluding to the end of my first marriage (and carefully remembering to state that that’s none of his business), he very sweetly says that I ‘might leave a wife, but not a...

Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary...

How ya doin’?’ I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, ‘A bit early to tell.

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.

Si me convierto será porque es preferible que muera un creyente a que lo haga un ateo.

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere ‘fringe’ elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—’The Bloc of...

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just ‘the occupation’ but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant...

He’s a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of...

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.

The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.

I defend Salman Rushdie because it a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor,...

I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter...

Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill...

Making another effort to be paradoxical, Williams decides to identify Orwell as an instance of ‘the paradox of the exile’. This, which he also identified with D. H. Lawrence, constituted an actual ‘tradition’, which, in...

[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don’t think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban...

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on...

There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called ‘popular culture’ or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media....

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously....

It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until ‘Juneteenth’. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their...

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...

And I’ll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people,...

The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can’t be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of ‘the flock.

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel...

To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy...