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Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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Christopher Eric Hitchens was an Anglo-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on politics, literature and religion. A staple of public discourse, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded intellectual and a controversial public figure. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, Free Inquiry and Vanity Fair.

Having long described himself as a social democrat, a Marxist, and an anti-totalitarian, he began to break with the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Satanic Verses controversy, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton and the antiwar movement's opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. His support of the Iraq War separated him further. While he came to reject socialism, he still identified as a Marxist and believed in both the dialectic and the materialist conception of history. His writings include critiques of public figures such as Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Diana, Princess of Wales. He was the elder brother of the conservative journalist and author Peter Hitchens. He advocated the separation of church and state.

As an antitheist he regarded the concept of a god or supreme being as a totalitarian belief that impedes individual freedom. He argued that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of informing ethics and defining codes of conduct for human civilization. The dictum "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" has become known as Hitchens's razor.

✵ 13. April 1949 – 15. December 2011   •   Other names Christopher Eric Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens photo
Christopher Hitchens: 305   quotes 11   likes

Christopher Hitchens Quotes

“Hitchens: "Exactly, you don't know where it is, in other words, do you? You have no idea where the country is on the map, and you're in favour of bombing it now rather than later, on the whim of a President."”

Christopher Hitchens

1990s

Idea , Country

“The British monarchy inculcates unthinking credulity and servility. It forms a heavy layer on the general encrustation of our unreformed political institutions. It is the gilded peg from which our unlovely system of social distinction and hierarchy depends. It is an obstacle to the objective public discussion of our own history. It tribalises politics. It entrenches the absurdity of the hereditary principle. It contributes to what sometimes looks like an enfeeblement of the national intelligence, drawing from our press and even from some of our poets the sort of degrading and abnegating propaganda that would arouse contempt if displayed in Zaire or Romania. It is, in short, neither dignified nor efficient.”

Christopher Hitchens

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

History , Intelligence , Drawing , Dependency

“If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka.”

Christopher Hitchens

2005-11-07

The Laura Ingraham Show, quoted in * 2005-11-10

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/11/christopher-hitchens-bad-language.html

Christopher Hitchens' Bad Language

Lenin's Tomb

2011-12-19
2000s, 2005

Thinking , Housing

“[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

Hardball with Chris Matthews, (2000) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8aqx6e403g
2000s, 2000

“You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal President successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so.”

Christopher Hitchens

2006-12-29
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/12/our_short_national_nightmare.html
Our Short National Nightmare
Slate
1091-2339
referencing a quote by Gerald Ford
2000s, 2006

Law , Exercises , Question , Thinking

“That phrase, "loss of innocence," has become stale with overuse and diminishing returns; no other culture is so addicted to this narcissistic impression of itself as having any innocence to lose in the first place.”

Christopher Hitchens

"The Road to West Egg" (2000).
2000s, 2000, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (2000)

Loss

“In their last ditch, the royalists object that this all too bloodless and practical; that people need and want the element of magic and fantasy. Nobody wants life to be charmless. But the element of fantasy and magic is as primitive as it is authentic, and there are good reasons why it should not come from the state. When orchestrated and distributed in that way, it leads to disappointment and rancour, and can lead to the enthronement of sillier or nastier idols.”

Christopher Hitchens

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

Life , People , Disappointment , Way

“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.”

Christopher Hitchens

"The State Within the State" (1991).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Peace

“If there is a sectarian war in Iraq today, or perhaps several sectarian wars, we have to understand that this was latent in the country, and in the state, and in the society all along. It was not the only possible outcome, because it had to be willed and organized, but it was certainly high on the list of probabilities.”

Christopher Hitchens

"Appointment in Mesopotamia" http://www.slate.com/id/2159082/, Slate (2007-02-05): On Iraq
2000s, 2007

War , Understanding , Country

“My book expresses, I rather say, contempt and hostility to this constant religious intimidation and clerical bullying to which we're being subjected. My book is part of an attempt to arrange and organize a push back against this…whether it's the parties of god destroying Iraqi civil society or bigots in America trying to have pseudo science taught in our schools or a pope who says that aids may be bad…and limbo by the way may have been a mistake, but let's talk about hell in any way…aids isn't as bad as condoms.”

Christopher Hitchens

Hannity's America, May 13, 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created
2000s, 2007

God , Hostility , Books , School

“Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power.”

Christopher Hitchens

Jan. 14, 2003 http://www.slate.com/id/2076712/: On Iraq
2000s, 2003

“Yet those who govern us as if were infants expect us to be grateful that at least we live in 'a family'; a family, moreover, patterned on the ideal by the example of the Windsors. A beaming gran, a dutiful mum, a stern and disciplined father, and children who are … well, all analogies based upon family break down somewhere. The analogy between family and society, as it happens, breaks down as soon as it is applied. The 'United Kingdom' is not a family and never was one. (Not even Orwell, with his image of poor relations, rich relations and 'the wrong members in control', could make it stick.) It is is a painfully evolved society, at once highly stratified and uniform and very fluid and diverse, which is the site of a multitude of competing interests.”

Christopher Hitchens

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

Children , Family

“That most risky and volatile of all things—a self-pitying majority.”

Christopher Hitchens

"Appointment in Sarajevo" (1992).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

“The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.”

Christopher Hitchens

"Ireland" (1998).
2000s, 2000, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (2000)

Truth

“I have noticed in observing and debating him [Moore] that he is an addict of crowd-pleasing and demagogy, and also an addict of "secret financial government" rhetoric. He also affects a certain plebeian and blue-collar style. When he thinks it will work, he will pretend to believe that "American jobs" are migrating to Mexico, or that "American boys" are being duped into war by hidden cabals. This combination of nativism and populism (stirred in with a nauseating dose of sentimentality and an absolutely breath-taking contempt for objective truth) reminds me very much of the dolts who joined the SA. But then, those guys were probably as surprised as their dumb Stalinist counterparts when the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed. By the way, that was the only treaty he signed that Stalin didn't break. With much of the remaining Left, I have to say, there is a certain immunity from Moore's gruesome posturing, if only because they don't think it was a good idea to have General Motors, or the city of Flint, Michigan, in the first place. And some of them are genuine pacifists, while Moore is an open supporter of the Islamist death-squads in Iraq.”

Christopher Hitchens

"Love, Poverty and War" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C78DC231-4599-4745-9CA5-A398398916A0, FrontPageMagazine.com (2004-12-29): On Michael Moore
2000s, 2004

Death , War , Truth , Secret

“Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

Christopher Hitchens

Andrew Cummins (@Vodkaninja), Twitter, December 4 2013. Screen capture https://homoeconomicusnet.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/did-christopher-hitchens-say-that-on-islamophobia-or-someone-on-twitter/.
Misattributed

“Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she’s just had?”

Christopher Hitchens

“And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful.” Peaceful?
"Why Women Aren’t Funny" https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/, Vanity Fair, (January 1, 2007).
2000s, 2007

Birthday , Religion , Making love , Personality

“Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.”

Christopher Hitchens

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

Making love , People , Stupidity

“An old definition of a gentleman: someone who is never rude except on purpose.”

Christopher Hitchens

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

“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

"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate," debate at University of Toronto, (2006-11-15). Hitchens argued the affirmative position. Info http://hhdce.sa.utoronto.ca/formaldebates_20062007.htm#20062007_3; video http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2007/03/free_speech_6.html.
2000s, 2006

Time , Kiss

“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.”

Christopher Hitchens

2005-10-10
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2005/10/miers_and_brimstone.html
Miers and Brimstone
Slate
1091-2339
2000s, 2005

Making love

“Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Christopher Hitchens

2003-10-20
Mommie Dearest
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html, quoted in Michael Shermer, "The Skeptic's Skeptic," Scientific American, November 2010, p. 86.
February/March
http://secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_24_2.html
Less than Miraculous
Free Inquiry
0272-0701
24
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." appears by itself in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).
Translation of the Latin phrase "Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.".
2000s, 2003
Variant: "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." in * 2004

“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

Christopher Hitchens, May 2002 http://archives.cjr.org/year/02/3/giuffo.asp: On Noam Chomsky
2000s, 2002

Way

“In their last ditch, the royalists object that this all too bloodless and practical; that people need and want the element of magic and fantasy. Nobody wants life to be charmless. But the element of fantasy and magic is as primitive as it is authentic, and there are good reasons why it should not come from the state.”

Christopher Hitchens

When orchestrated and distributed in that way, it leads to disappointment and rancour, and can lead to the enthronement of sillier or nastier idols.
1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

Life , People

“Most of our British Muslim population is Pakistani. If that population was Indonesian or Tunisian the situation would not be the same. Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.”

Christopher Hitchens

"FANATICS OF LONDON" http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/06/hitchensqanda200706/, by Walter Owen, "Vanity Fair", (06/02/2007)
2000s, 2007

Idea , People

“As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be "me."”

Christopher Hitchens

Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.

II
2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012)

Business

“To the dumb question "Why me?"”

Christopher Hitchens

the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

I
2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012)

Question

“You seem to be angry with religion, angry with god. Am I wrong in my perception?”

Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens-"Not with god, obviously,that would be absurd."

Hannity's America, May 13, 2007, interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created
2000s, 2007

God , Religion

“And that's where it stops, or you think this creator cares about you too?”

Christopher Hitchens

Hannity's America, May 13, 2007, interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created
2000s, 2007

Thinking

“I am a believer. I believe in a creator.”

Christopher Hitchens

Hannity
2000s, 2007

“If a great city or a great state should fall as the result of an apparent "accident", the there would be a general reason why it required only an accident to make it fall.”

Christopher Hitchens

"No One Left To Lie To" (1991).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Making love

“And where did anyone get the brainless opinion that the super-rich are too wealthy to steal? ...from Ford to Hughes to Iacocca and Trump and the other tycoon redeemers, we have an exact demonstration that nobody is more covetous and greedy than those who have far too much."”

Christopher Hitchens

"Billionaire Populism" (1992)
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)
Source: [New York, The Nation, Christopher, Hitchens, Billionaire Populism, July 1992]

“But for those who lived in non-Christian lands, it was decreed that the work of conversion was an imperative. It is, in a sense, a pity that this work will always be remembered for its association either with conquest, with religious fratricide or with imperialism.”

Christopher Hitchens book The Missionary Position

Source: 2010s, 2011, The Missionary Position, Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice (2012)

Sense

“When Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, few people had the poor taste to ask what she had ever done, or even claimed to do, for the cause of peace. Her address to the ceremony of investiture did little to resolve any doubt on this score and much to increase it.”

Christopher Hitchens book The Missionary Position

Source: 2010s, 2011, The Missionary Position, Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice (2012)

People , Peace