The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity
Interpretation
Those lacking a sense of humor are unfit for power as they impose dullness and sameness.
Christopher Hitchens emphasizes the dangers of humorless individuals wielding power, suggesting that their lack of humor fosters rigidity, tedium, and a monotonous environment. The quote warns that such individuals may enforce an oppressive certainty about what is 'right', which stifles creativity and individuality.
In practice
During a leadership seminar, to emphasize the importance of humor in management.
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 nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
If you're politically correct, chances are you're not coming to one of my shows. I get to go onstage and say things that everybody thinks all the time, but can't say out loud.
In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?
It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope.
...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.
Bigamy is the only crime where two rites make a wrong.
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