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  "title": "For the Sake of Argument",
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      "text": "The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.",
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      "text": "The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for \"peace through strength\" has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog.",
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      "text": "The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient.",
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      "text": "\"Peace through Strength,\" surely history's most exploded nostrum.",
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      "text": "Perhaps the values of socialists can only be realized by socialists in a nonsocialist society.",
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      "text": "The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. \"Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process?\"",
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      "text": "What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.",
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      "text": "If a great city or a great state should fall as the result of an apparent \"accident\", the there would be a general reason why it required only an accident to make it fall.",
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      "text": "Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, \"taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power.\" History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.",
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      "text": "And where did anyone get the brainless opinion that the super-rich are too wealthy to steal? ...from Ford to Hughes to Iacocca and Trump and the other tycoon redeemers, we have an exact demonstration that nobody is more covetous and greedy than those who have far too much.\"",
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      "text": "It is rather a pity, considered from the standpoint of the professional politician or opinion-taker, that nobody knows exactly what \"credibility\" is, or how one acquires it. \"Credibility\" doesn't stand for anything morally straightforward, like meaning what you say or saying what you mean. Nor does it signify anything remotely quantifiable — any correlation between evidence presented and case made. Suggestively, perhaps, it entered the language as a consensus euphemism during the Vietnam War, when \"concerned\" members of the Eastern Establishment spoke of a \"credibility gap\" rather than give awful utterance to the thought that the Johnson administration was systematically lying. To restore its \"credibility,\" that administration was urged — not to stop lying, but to improve its public presentation. At some stage in the lesson learned from that injunction, the era of postmodern politics began. It doesn't seem ridiculous now to have \"approval ratings\" that fluctuate from week to week, because these are based upon the all-important \"perception\" factor, which has in turn quite lost its own relationship to the word \"perceptive.\"",
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      "text": "It is not enough to \"have\" free speech. People must learn to speak freely. Noam Chomsky remarked in the sixties about the short-life ultra-radicals on campus who thought that Marx should have been burning down the British Museum rather than writing and thinking in it. The less political descendants of that faction have now tried to reduce life to a system of empowerment etiquette, and have wasted a lot of their own time and everyone else's in the process. But the real bridle on our tongues is imposed by the everyday lying and jargon, sanctioned and promulgated at the highest levels of media and politics, and not by the awkward handful who imagine themselves revolutionaries.",
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      "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:43:04"
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    {
      "id": "06e4d727-daef-4a05-bdf3-cfdf45b6a9a1",
      "slug": "there-is-a-limit",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/for-the-sake-of-argument/there-is-a-limit",
      "text": "There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of \"little guy\" or \"silent majority\" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves.",
      "language": "en",
      "character": null,
      "chapter": null,
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      "topics": [
        {
          "name": "politics",
          "slug": "politics",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics"
        },
        {
          "name": "manipulation",
          "slug": "manipulation",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/manipulation"
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      "source": {
        "name": "Wikiquote",
        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens#For_the_Sake_of_Argument:_Essays_and_Minority_Reports_(1993)",
        "license": {
          "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
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}