-
It was an axiom of 'containment' that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. 'Neutralism' was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological - and sometimes military - pressure to fall into line.
Christopher Hitchens -
We had enough of people who think like you, that they know what god wants and that they've got god on their side. That they can tell us what to do or what to think in this way.
Christopher Hitchens
-
My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.
Christopher Hitchens -
Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
Christopher Hitchens -
It’s a very vulgar, arithmetical, pragmatic way of arguing anyway. If you do that, then get the facts and figures wrong, well then you’re really fucked. You’re fucked twice.
Christopher Hitchens -
We are not occupying Afghanistan, we are there as guests of a government, at their request.
Christopher Hitchens -
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.
Christopher Hitchens -
..those who view the history of North America as a narrative of genocide and slavery are, it seems to me, hopelessly stuck on this reactionary position. They can think of the Western expansion of the United States only in terms of plague blankets, bootleg booze and dead buffalo, never in terms of the medicine chest, the wheel and the railway.
Christopher Hitchens
-
I doubt that even if this evidence could be upgraded to 100 per cent it would persuade the sort of people who go on self-appointed missions of mediation to Baghdad. These people further fail to see that governments now have a further responsibility to their citizens - namely to see that something is done to prevent future assaults on civilisation.
Christopher Hitchens -
The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
Christopher Hitchens -
George W. Bush is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.
Christopher Hitchens -
There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.
Christopher Hitchens -
To the dumb question 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
Christopher Hitchens -
Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!
Christopher Hitchens
-
It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true.
Christopher Hitchens -
Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.
Christopher Hitchens -
It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque.
Christopher Hitchens -
Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.
Christopher Hitchens -
It Obama's Nobel peace prize would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.
Christopher Hitchens -
In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
Christopher Hitchens
-
There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.
Christopher Hitchens -
The conservative aptitude for stressing the 'individual responsibility' of all parties except themselves.
Christopher Hitchens -
Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!
Christopher Hitchens -
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.
Christopher Hitchens