{"quotes":[{"text":"September 11… I will never forget feeling scared and vulnerable… I will never forget feeling the deep sad loss of so many lives… I will never forget the smell of the smoke that reached across the water and delivered a deep feeling of doom into my gut… I will never forget feeling the boosted sense of unity and pride… I will never forget seeing the courageous actions of so many men and women… I will never forget seeing people of all backgrounds working together in community… I will never forget seeing what hate can destroy… I will never forget seeing what love can heal….","author":"Steve Maraboli","tags":["9-11","actions","courage","hate","healing","lives","lost","love","pride","scared","september-11-attacks","smoke","trade-centers","unity"],"id":23150,"author_id":"Steve+Maraboli"},{"text":"[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["islamism","jihad","september-11-attacks","terrorism"],"id":71342,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"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 from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["2001","new-york","september-11-attacks","terrorism","war","war-on-terror","washington-dc"],"id":72326,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["2011","abu-musab-al-zarqawi","al-qaeda","al-qaeda-in-iraq","arab-spring","death","death-of-osama-bin-laden","exorcism","feminism","iraq","islamism","life","literature","music","osama-bin-laden","pakistan","secularism","september-11-attacks","sunni-islam","terrorism","theocracy"],"id":101704,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["irrationality","logic","rationalisation","reason","september-11-attacks"],"id":101739,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"I define success as being the best, authentic me that I can be.","author":"Leeky Behrman","tags":["memoir","self-help-inspirational","september-11-attacks","world-trade-center"],"id":163497,"author_id":"Leeky+Behrman"},{"text":"I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity...On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.","author":"Susan Abulhawa","tags":["america","americans","palestinians","september-11-attacks","september-9-11"],"id":184754,"author_id":"Susan+Abulhawa"},{"text":"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.","author":"Jeffrey Rosen","tags":["american-society","biometrics","constitution","constitutional-rights","dystopia","fourth-amendment","liberty","privacy","september-11-attacks","surveillance","surveillance-society"],"id":197705,"author_id":"Jeffrey+Rosen"},{"text":"Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ['Letters,' December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the 'roots' of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11:Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts...') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["2001","afghanistan","debate","genocide","leftism","morality","noam-chomsky","politics","september-11-attacks","terrorism","the-nation","war","war-in-afghanistan-2001-presen"],"id":229264,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.","author":"Michael Crichton","tags":["9-11","bisphenol-a","bpa","consensus","darwinism","evolution","excitotoxins","fluoride","global-warming","id","intelligent-design","macro-evolution","macroevolution","majority","majority-view","man-made-global-warming","manmade-global-warming","minority","minority-view","monosodium-glutamate","msg","science","scientific-discovery","scientific-inquiry","scientific-method","scientific-process","scientific-research","scientific-revolution","scientific-theory","september-11-attacks"],"id":334770,"author_id":"Michael+Crichton"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":23,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}