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Christopher Hitchens cytaty
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Christopher Eric Hitchens – amerykańsko-brytyjski pisarz, dziennikarz i krytyk literacki.

Jego teksty publikowało wiele opiniotwórczych magazynów, m.in. „Vanity Fair”, społeczno-kulturalny „The Atlantic”, lewicowy „The Nation”, racjonalistyczny „Free Inquiry” oraz „The Wall Street Journal”. Hitchens znany był z admiracji dla takich postaci jak George Orwell, Thomas Paine i Thomas Jefferson, których biografie napisał, oraz z niechęci do matki Teresy, Billa i Hillary Clintonów, Henry’ego Kissingera i brytyjskiej rodziny królewskiej. Wydał ponad 20 książek. Uważał się za marksistę. Był jednym z głównych przedstawicieli nowego ateizmu. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. Kwiecień 1949 – 15. Grudzień 2011   •   Natępne imiona Christopher Eric Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens Fotografia
Christopher Hitchens: 328   Cytatów 0   Polubień

Christopher Hitchens słynne cytaty

„Nie daj się zaszufladkować; spodziewaj się jednak, że nazwą cię „fanatykiem” i „rozrabiaką.””

Christopher Hitchens

Źródło: Listy do młodego buntownika; cyt. za Artur Domosławski, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) Skandalista, polityka.pl, 17 grudnia 2011 http://www.polityka.pl/swiat/ludzie/1522573,4,christopher-hitchens-1949--2011.read

„Jesteśmy zbyt wyrafinowani intelektualnie by wierzyć w Boga, kreacjonizm i inne rzeczy tego rodzaju – powiadają lepiej wykształceni obrońcy kultu Matki Teresy. Jednak wierzymy w religię – przynajmniej dla innych. Religia to najprostszy sposób sprzedaży nadziei i najtańszy sposób upowszechnienia zasad moralnych. To również forma dyscypliny.(…) Filozofia i wiedza przeznaczone są tylko dla wybrańców, masom pozostaje religia i sentymentalne wzruszenia.”

Christopher Hitchens książka Misjonarska miłość. Matka Teresa w teorii i w praktyce

Misjonarska miłość. Matka Teresa w teorii i w praktyce (1995)
Źródło: str. 60.

„Nie bój się, że będą nazywać cię maniakiem.”

Christopher Hitchens

Źródło: Listy do młodego buntownika; cyt. za Artur Domosławski, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) Skandalista, polityka.pl, 17 grudnia 2011 http://www.polityka.pl/swiat/ludzie/1522573,2,christopher-hitchens-1949--2011.read

„(…) musimy wyjść poza naszą prehistorię i wyrwać się z kostropatych łapsk, które usiłują ciągnąć nas wstecz do katakumb i okopconych ołtarzy, ku grzesznej rozkoszy upokorzenia i służalczości”

Christopher Hitchens

Źródło: Artur Domosławski, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) Skandalista, polityka.pl, 17 grudnia 2011 http://www.polityka.pl/swiat/ludzie/1522573,2,christopher-hitchens-1949--2011.read

„Byłem z komunistami przeciw apartheidowi, z „zimnowojennymi wojownikami” broniłem Czechosłowacji. W Bośni byłem po stronie muzułmanów, którzy nie zgadzali się ze mną w sprawie Salmana Rushdiego. Innym razem z Żydami, dla których byłem podejrzany z powodu popierania idei państwa palestyńskiego.”

Christopher Hitchens

Źródło: Listy do młodego buntownika; cyt. za Artur Domosławski, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) Skandalista, polityka.pl, 17 grudnia 2011 http://www.polityka.pl/swiat/ludzie/1522573,4,christopher-hitchens-1949--2011.read

„Religia pochodzi z dzieciństwa naszego gatunku i jest niemowlęcą próbą odpowiedzi na naszą nieuniknioną potrzebę wiedzy.”

Christopher Hitchens książka Bóg nie jest wielki

Bóg nie jest wielki (2007)

Christopher Hitchens Cytaty o ludziach

„Nie zapominajmy, że ci którzy potrafią wpływać na swój publiczny wizerunek, w istocie decydują o treści mitów na własny temat. Ludzie myślą o nich to, co oni sami o sobie myślą. W dzisiejszym świecie słowa i czyny osądza się na podstawie reputacji osoby, której słowa i czyny oceniamy, a nie odwrotnie.”

Christopher Hitchens książka Misjonarska miłość. Matka Teresa w teorii i w praktyce

Misjonarska miłość. Matka Teresa w teorii i w praktyce (1995)
Źródło: str.9.

„Ci, którzy chcą myśleć niezależnie, zawsze będą w mniejszości.”

Christopher Hitchens

Źródło: Listy do młodego buntownika; cyt. za Artur Domosławski, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) Skandalista, polityka.pl, 17 grudnia 2011 http://www.polityka.pl/swiat/ludzie/1522573,1,christopher-hitchens-1949--2011.read

„Ludzie bogaci chcą wierzyć, że ktoś, gdzieś naprawdę coś robi dla Trzeciego Świata. Dlatego nie chcą przyglądać się motywom działania i praktykom stosowanym przez tych, którzy zdają się pełnić tę rolę, bez względu na to, jak się z niej wywiązują.”

Christopher Hitchens książka Misjonarska miłość. Matka Teresa w teorii i w praktyce

Misjonarska miłość. Matka Teresa w teorii i w praktyce (1995)
Źródło: str. 34–35.

„Poznałem wielu odważnych, bezinteresownych buntowników, którzy bezrefleksyjnie wyznają islam albo wierzą w komunizm, nie zadając żadnych pytań. Ludzie tacy w moim przekonaniu nie zasługują na miano dysydentów czy opozycjonistów, ponieważ w ich wzorzec myślenia już są wpisane przyszłe opresje.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 78-79.

Christopher Hitchens Cytaty o religii

„I znów poczułem nagłe ukłucie oburzenia i jednocześnie niedowierzania. Czemuż to padają słowa, wedle których religia nie do końca jest prawdziwa, ale jednocześnie nie jest to ważne, bowiem jej fundamentem jest duchowe pocieszenie? Jakież to godne pogardy.”

Christopher Hitchens książka Bóg nie jest wielki

reakcja Hitchensa na słowa dyrektora szkoły do której uczęszczał.
Bóg nie jest wielki (2007)

„Zorganizowana religia jest głównym źródłem zła na świecie: jest pełna przemocy, nielogiczna, nietolerancyjna, nierozerwalnie związana z takimi pojęciami, jak rasizm, ustrój plemienny czy bigoteria; zakorzeniona w ignorancji i wrogo nastawiona do wszelkich prób poznawczych, pogardliwa wobec kobiet i narzucana dzieciom.”

Christopher Hitchens książka Bóg nie jest wielki

Bóg nie jest wielki (2007)

„Dwie najgorsze rzeczy, o czym można się przekonać, nawet nigdzie nie wyjeżdżając, to rasizm i religia.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 129.

Christopher Hitchens cytaty

„W jednym jestem stały, w walce przeciw totalitaryzmom, i tym z prawej, i z lewej strony. Totalitaryzm jest moim wrogiem, ten absolutny, który chce kontrolować to, co jest w twojej głowie, a nie tylko to, co robisz i twoje podatki.”

Christopher Hitchens

I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. (ang.)
Źródło: rozmowa Richarda Dawkinsa, „New Statesman”, 13 grudnia 2011 http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/dawkins-hitchens-catholic

O walce

„Matka Teresa nigdy nie twierdziła, że jej działalność jest czymkolwiek innym niż fundamentalistyczną kampanią religijną, (…) przyznawała, że najubożsi z ubogich byli tylko jej narzędziem, dobrą okazją do wykazania się pobożnością.”

Christopher Hitchens książka Misjonarska miłość. Matka Teresa w teorii i w praktyce

Misjonarska miłość. Matka Teresa w teorii i w praktyce (1995)
Źródło: str. 24.

O matce

„Żyj w zgodzie ze swoim wewnętrznym Yossarianem.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 120.

„Z całych sił staraj się zwalczać atrofię i rutynę. Kwestionowanie Oczywistości i tego, co dane z góry, jest najważniejszym elementem maksymy de omnibus dubitandum.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 69.

„Wyobraź sobie ciągły błogostan i harmonię, a ujrzysz rzeczywistość pełną monotonii, bezcelowości i przewidywalności.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 42.

O rzeczywostości

„Umysł jest naszym najcenniejszym narzędziem - nie powinno się go przyzwyczajać do zakładania z góry tego, czego jeszcze nie dowiedziono.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 73.

„Tłum czy zbiorowość ma najczęściej niższą inteligencję niż składające się na niego poszczególne osoby.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 93.

O inteligencji

„Sprzeciw nie jest równoznaczny z nihilizmem.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 28.

„Ćwierćinteligenci przystępują do kultów, których jedynym celem jest uśmierzenie bólu myślenia.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 48.

O myślach , O myśleniu

„Codzienna dawka irytacji przedłuża życie.”

Christopher Hitchens

Listy do młodego kontestatora (2001)
Źródło: s. 70.

O życiu

Christopher Hitchens: Cytaty po angielsku

“My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States … In some awful way, his regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs. This is not at all like watching the implosion of an obvious huckster and jerk like Michael Moore, who would have made a perfectly good Brownshirt populist. The collapse of Chomsky feels to me more like tragedy.”

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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 Noam Chomsky
2000s, 2004

“Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism… professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon… Nothing serious," as Chomsky puts it, "has been provided since.".. So is one to assume that he [Chomsky] has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker"? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?”

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Christopher Hitchens

2010s, 2011

“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.”

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Christopher Hitchens

"Nixon: Maestro of Resentment" (1990).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

“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.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2007-11-06
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
Christopher Hitchens
978-0306816086
http://quotes.pink/god/quote-8195/
2000s, 2007

“The death toll is not nearly high enough… too many [jihadists] have escaped.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Referring to the Fallujah offensive on November 2004
Speech at Kenyon College, Ohio http://collegian.kenyon.edu/article.php?id=2400, (2004-11-15): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2004

“.. 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.”

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Christopher Hitchens

"Minority Report", The Nation, October 19, 1992; also in Salaita, p. 68.
1990s

“I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2006-06-05
The Hell of War
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/06/the_hell_of_war.html
2000s, 2006

“Will an Iraq war make our Al Qaeda problem worse? Not likely.”

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Christopher Hitchens

A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (Plume, 2003) [published in the United Kingdom as Regime Change]; quoted in "The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens" http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/seymour261105.html by Richard Seymour, Monthly Review (2005-11-26): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2005

“Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations— he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument ("The 'We' Fallacy"), February 1988: On Noam Chomsky
1980s

“[Even if the U. S. doesn't attack] Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Nov. 7, 2002 http://www.slate.com/id/2073634/: On Iraq
2000s, 2002

“That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought – destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position – leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that – like Chomsky – looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.”

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Christopher Hitchens

"In enemy territory? An interview with Christopher Hitchens." http://www.johannhari.com/2004/09/23/in-enemy-territory-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens, Interview with Johann Hari (2004-09-23): On the Bosnian War
2000s, 2004

“I just wanted to say something about (…) my resentment of the identification of this country of Britain with royalty. As if we have nothing else to offer as a culture – the country of my birth. The great contribution, of the English anyway, to the world is literature and language. That language and literature is, in fact, in its tradition quite extensively republican and democratic. I mean our Blake, Milton, our Shelley, many many other great writers, poetry and prose, have been against the idea that Britain is a feudal or monarchic system. One of the great aspects of that tradition is represented by the name Thomas Paine, who is the moral author of your Declaration of Independence. In fact, one of the great accomplishments of the English republican movement, if you like, is the American Declaration of Independence. So it has always struck me as rather bizarre that there is this cult in the United States of English royalism – just the sort of thing I left England to get away from.”

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Christopher Hitchens

1997-05-09
Christopher Hitchens on Diana, Princess of Wales, the Royal Family, Dodi Fayed & Muslim Law (1997)
C-SPAN
Washington, D.C.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQK2d1TdTzk
1990s

“Their [antiwar movement] mantra was: "Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country." Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, "Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one"? "Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women." "Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones." "Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime." I could go on. (I think No. 4 may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the "doves" to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to reread themselves saying things like, "The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic."”

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Christopher Hitchens

2000s, 2001

“The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism… is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism http://www.pbs.org/heavenonearth/interviews_hitchens.html, PBS (June 2005).
2000s, 2005

“There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.”

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Christopher Hitchens

"Voters will remember disaster response, Hitchens says" http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1453763.htm, Lateline interview with Tony Jones, Australian Broadcasting Corporation {2005-09-05): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2005

“We know that there are people for whom the country and a certain rather mediocre dynasty are in effect unimaginable without one another. There is no need to doubt or mock the sincerity of the conviction. However, there is no reason in our history or our literature to endorse or underwrite it either. We possess an alternative tradition which is capable of outlasting this royal house as it has already outlasted others.”

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Christopher Hitchens

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

“He [Chomsky] has now been impeached by his own standards, since scrutiny of the evidence does not bear him out on Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. It didn't bear him out on Cambodia either, though he was never a "Holocaust denier" or anything like it. And he has, I think, ceased to be of any use to young people who might pardonably doubt the official story. The position he took, comparing the attack on the World Trade Center to an admittedly criminal Clintonian strike on Sudan (and virtually concluding that the latter was worse!) showed the absolute exhaustion of the glib "double standards" school, as I point out extensively in Love, Poverty and War. But his decline and fall is a loss, and you miss the point by denying it.”

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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 Noam Chomsky
2000s, 2004

“The idea that God speaks to some illiterate merchant warlord in Arabia, and he’s able to write this down perfectly and it contains the answers to all — don’t waste my time with that bulls**t. Also, the archangel Gabriel speaks only Arabic, it seems? Crap.”

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Christopher Hitchens

http://www.inquisitr.com/1735647/christopher-hitchens-islam-comments-resurface-after-charlie-hebdo-its-the-most-depraved-religion/
2010s, 2010

“Hannity-"You seem to be angry with religion, angry with god. Am I wrong in my perception?" Hitchens-"Not with god, obviously, that would be absurd."”

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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

“It's in human nature to mention any personal connection when offering solidarity, so I shall just briefly say that on my first visit to India, in 1980, I stayed at the Taj Mahal in Bombay, visited the "Gateway of India" and took a boat to Elephanta Island, toured the magnificent railway station, had my first diwali festival at Juhu beach, and paced the amazing corniche that was still known by some—after its dazzling string of lights—as "Queen Victoria's necklace." Wonderful though some of the 19th-century British architecture can be, Bombay is quintessentially an Indian achievement, and an achievement of all its peoples from the Portuguese-speaking Catholic Goans to the Zoroastrian Parsis.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2000s, 2008, "Our Friends in Bombay", 2008

“The realization that American power could and should be used for the defense of pluralism and as a punishment for fascism came to me in Sarajevo a year or two later… That was an early quarrel between me and many of my Nation colleagues, and it was also the first time I found myself in the same trench as people like Paul Wolfowitz and Jeane Kirkpatrick: a shock I had to learn to get over.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2000s, 2003

“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.”

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Christopher Hitchens

"We Must Fight Iraq" http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12227453&method=full&siteid=50143, Daily Mirror (2002-09-25): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2002, We Must Fight Iraq (2002)

“Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything … If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html: On Michael Moore
2000s, 2004

“I don't have to begin, as I would have if I were speaking for the Church, with any apologies. We don't have a lot to apologize for. It wasn't we who framed Galileo, it wasn't we who said that God wanted the Crusades, it wasn't we who mounted the Inquisition, it wasn't we who sponsored Pavoloch, Salazar, Mussolini, Dollfuss, Hitler, Vichy, Franco, and the rest of it; and it wasn't we who preached the Easter sermon saying who was responsible for the death of a mythical figure, and creating ludicrous pain to real people, in the real world. We don't have to begin by proving that our institutions and our beliefs are human, as all human institutions are; that we are only mammals, as his holiness the Pope is only a mammal. We don't make a mystery where none exists. We say that we face the heavens, and we find them empty; and that some of us, at any rate, are not alarmed to find this emptiness; and would be more alarmed to find the heavens full of permanent supervision and invigilation; and that an ethical life may be led by someone with no supernatural means of support, without the fear, if it is a fear, or the hope, if it is a hope, of celestial invigilation.”

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Christopher Hitchens

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

“"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.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2001-11-15
Christopher Hitchens on why peace-lovers must welcome this war
The Mirror
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/WAR+ON+TERROR%3a+CHRISTOPHER+HITCHENS+on+why+peace-lovers+must+welcome...-a080078072: On the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
2000s, 2001

“The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient.”

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Christopher Hitchens

"The 'We' Fallacy" (1988).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

“We find that the presidency has become too secretive, too powerful, too trammelled, too ceremonial, too impotent or too complicated, depending on the president under discussion or the critic making the analysis. On one thing all are agreed - there is a danger of an 'imperial' or 'monarchical' presidency. An incumbent in Washington knows he is in trouble on the day that cartoonists begin to represent him as a king.”

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Christopher Hitchens

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

“When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2003-11-18
Al-Qaida's Latest Target: Understanding the Istanbul synagogue bombings
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/11/alqaidas_latest_target.html
2000s, 2003

“I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view…. I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”

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Christopher Hitchens

"Images in a Rearview Mirror The Nation" http://www.thenation.com/article/images-rearview-mirror, The Nation (November 15, 2001).
2000s, 2001

“Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2005-05-23
Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
season 3 episode 5
Holier Than Thou
Television
2000s, 2005