Christopher Hitchens Quotes
-
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.
-
If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka.
-
..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.
-
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.
-
'Peace through Strength,' surely history's most exploded nostrum.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.
-
Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone (Michael Moore) who actually embodies all of those qualities.
-
The progress that's made … in any argument or in any discussion is by confrontation. That's a dialectical fact. People say 'oh let's have less heat and more light,' fatuously. There's only one source of light. It happens to be heat.
-
To the dumb question 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
-
David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.
-
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!
-
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.
-
Even if the U.S. doesn't attack Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion.
-
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.
-
We are not occupying Afghanistan, we are there as guests of a government, at their request.
-
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.
-
'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals... But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age.
-
We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.
-
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?'
-
One could happily make a case that more random civilians, and fewer fucking lawyers, should be on the court. But the only other thing to say about Miers is that she is a fucking lawyer.
-
The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.
-
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.