“‘Tourist of the Revolution’ was a phrase that was later used to ridicule those who went in search of socialist fatherlands, but I truly did not think of myself as a tourist. I simply and exhaustingly and fervently wished I could be in many places at once, so as to lean the uttermost of my slight weight on the fulcrum. It was years later that I read Thomas Paine saying that to have played a part in two revolutions was ‘to have lived to some purpose.’ This was the sort of eloquence that I wish I could have commanded at the time.”

-Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22