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Christopher Hitchens: 610 quotes11 likes

“All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.”

Christopher Hitchens

"Not Dead Yet" (1999).
2000s, 2000, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (2000)

“No possible future government in Kabul can be worse than the Taliban, and no thinkable future government would allow the level of Al Qaeda gangsterism to recur. So the outcome is proportionate and congruent with international principles of self-defense.”

Christopher Hitchens

2001-12-21
The Ends of War
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/article/ends-war: On the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
2000s, 2001

“Charlton Heston: "Yes indeed I can (…). Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, Russia, uh… Iran."”

Christopher Hitchens

1990s

“I can never quite decide whether the anti-Columbus movement is merely risible or faintly sinister…. It is sinister, though, because it is an ignorant celebration of stasis and backwardness, with an unpleasant tinge of self-hatred.”

Christopher Hitchens

"Minority Report", The Nation, October 19, 1992. Also quoted in Steven Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit:Colonialism And the Quest for Canaan. Syracuse University Press, 2006.(p. 68).
1990s

“Mosul is the site of a very famous old Iraqi university. The American forces were refurbishing the place. They were going to tear down some of the outer walls, give this palace to the university. They'd also connected the university to the Internet and to the Web. Helped people contact scholars on the outside world. That was all the job of these very good- humored, very thoughtful officers who were really helping to rebuild the place… I felt a sense of annoyance that I had to go there myself to find any of that out.”

Christopher Hitchens

Interview with Gibson https://web.archive.org/web/20030810014618/http://michaeltotten.com/ (July 2003), Vanity Fair. 2000s, 2003

“The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine—religious doctrine condemns them, and then if you'll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism will increase. It doesn't matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance and disease stupidity from women, it is invariably the clericy that stands in the way, or in the case of—now, furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, say, which I would hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I'd be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say.”

Christopher Hitchens

Debate vs. Tony Blair, "Be it Resolved, Religion is a Force for Good in the World" (November 26, 2010), Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, Ontario.
2010s, 2010

“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

2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

“Cain: "Mr Hitchens, if I may interject, I'm not sure [about the relevance] of the instantaneous command of the geography of a region."”

Christopher Hitchens

1990s

“The best case scenario is a rapid attack by precision-guided weapons, striking Saddam's communications in the first hours and preventing his deranged orders from being obeyed. Then a massive landing will bring food, medicine and laptop computers to a surging crowd of thankful and relieved Iraqis and Kurds. This could, in theory, all happen.”

Christopher Hitchens

"What Happens Next to Iraq" http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_objectid=12677144&method=full&siteid=94762-name_page.html, Daily Mirror (2003-02-26): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq 2000s, 2003

“Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.”

Christopher Hitchens

2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

“The regular media caricature of Iraqi society is not even a parody. It is very common indeed to find mixed and intermarried families, and these loyalties and allegiances outweigh anything that can be mustered by a Jordanian jailbird who has bet everything on trying to ignite a sectarian war. Second, it means in the not very long run that the so-called insurgency can be politically isolated and militarily defeated. It already operates within a minority of a minority and is largely directed by unpopular outsiders.”

Christopher Hitchens

"It's Curtains for al-Qaida" http://www.slate.com/id/2134378/, Slate (2006-01-16): On Iraq 2000s, 2006

“Interviewer: It seems to be acknowledged that there're more people out there supporting the aims of Al-Qaeda and groups like them, and are willing to die, as a result of this war, than perhaps there were previously?

Hitchens: Well, you could as easily say that the number of people who used to be based in Afghanistan, have, as a result of the intervention there, relocated themselves and spread the virus in that way. Both of these arguments lead to only one terminus, which is: we should surrender to jihadism, and not try to oppose it, in case we make them upset.”

Christopher Hitchens

Scotland Live (2005-10-31}: On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2005

“In today's Britain, the idea that there could be a Constitution more powerful - and even sacrosanct - than any crowned head or elected politician (thus abolishing the false antithesis between hereditary monarchs and capricious presidents) is thought of as a breathtakingly new and daring idea.”

Christopher Hitchens

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“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.”

Christopher Hitchens

"Politically Correct" (1991).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

“The truth of matter is, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, brothers and sisters, religion has it very much its own way in this country of ours. It's in the pledge of allegiance, thanks to a stupid intervention of President Eisenhower; it's on the money, it's in the opening of Congress every day, it's at the National Prayer Breakfast, it's when the delinquent president summons his advisors and his spiritual team in order to fend off what should have been inevitable, it's when Al Gore can't bring himself to criticize a decision of the Oklahoma school board, and it's high time that that situation was reversed and we developed a proper immunity to it, and made sure that religion can only be self-inflicted.”

Christopher Hitchens

2000s, 2000, "Hostility Of America to Religion" (2000)

“If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a concentration of enemy troops… then it's pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't be able to say, 'Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.”

Christopher Hitchens

No way, 'cause it'll go straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words.
Quoted in * 2002-09-23
The Left and 9/11
Adam
Shatz
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20020923&s=shatz
2000s, 2002

“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.”

Christopher Hitchens

"Hating Sweden" (1989).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

“There's no such word, though there should be, as "adeism" or as being an "adeist", but if there was one I would say that's what I was. I don't believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death. If there was such a force, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn't prove that this entity cared about us; answered prayers; cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all; cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means; cared what we ate or on what day; cared whether we lived or died. There's no reason at all why this entity isn't completely indifferent to us. You cannot get from deism to theism - except by a series of extraordinarily generous (to yourself) assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation; to redemption; to salvation; or to suspensions of the natural order.”

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Lane Craig, 04/04/2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8&t=42m38s 2000s, 2009

“For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick.”

Christopher Hitchens

" For the Sake of Argument https://web.archive.org/web/20070827152049/http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1171" at www.booknotes.org, October 17, 1993. 1990s

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.”

Christopher Hitchens

V.
2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012)