Christopher Hitchens quotes - page 5
A people that began to think as citizens rather than subjects might transcend underdevelopment on their own. Inalienable human right is unique in that it needs no superhuman guarantee; no 'fount' except itself. Only servility requires the realm (suggestive word) of illusion. Illusions, of course, cannot be abolished. But they can and must be outgrown.
Christopher Hitchens
The next stop on Reagan's European tour after Bitburg was Madrid, where he made a speech in which he said, "I know there's been a lot of controversy about the United States and Spain at that time, indeed some Americans once came here to fight in the civil war." He said, "But the thing is," said Reagan, "they were on the wrong side." In other words a conscious choice, a conscious and deliberate remark showing that the sympathy for fascism, not accidental, not anecdotal, not a slip of the tongue, but something bred-in-the-bone; and, I think, also worth recalling.
Christopher Hitchens
Doing nothing is not the absence of a policy; it is, in fact, the adoption of one. "Neutrality" favors the side with the biggest arsenal. "Nonintervention" is a form of interference. If you will the end-and President Barack Obama has finally said that Qaddafi should indeed go-then to that extent you will the means...The immediate task is therefore to limit the amount of damage Qaddafi can do and sharply minimize the number of people he can murder. Whatever the character of the successor system turns out to be, it can hardly be worsened if we show it positive signs of friendship and solidarity...I am sure I am not alone in feeling rather queasy about being forced to watch the fires in Tripoli and Benghazi as if I were an impotent spectator. Indifference of this kind to the lives of others can have a coarsening effect. It can lower one's threshold of sympathy. If protracted unduly, it might even become brutalizing.
Christopher Hitchens
Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomsky's effort to "minimize" or "deny" the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony "credibility" of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize "the other side"; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making.
Christopher Hitchens
The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on-only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.
Christopher Hitchens
![[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. (Christopher Hitchens)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/83/christopher-hitchens-anything-bear-426083.webp)
I don't see how you can be saying this. Look. You want to take...you want your god to take responsibility for the huge number of collapsing stars and imploding galaxies and destroyed universes and failed solar systems that have left us in this tiny corner on the one planet in this petty solar system that can support life some of the time on some of its surface. And you want a creator who filled this earth with species, since life began 99% of which are now extinct already...and this is some design, isn't it?
Christopher Hitchens
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.
Christopher Hitchens
...in fact, the war against Iraq is continuing. And it's continuing now by the means which the administration described as contemptible and useless, when they were put forth as an alternative to an actual all-out aerial bombardment. Namely, economic sanctions, which do have the effect of slowly starving and crippling the population of Iraq, while leaving the military caste of Saddam Hussein and his criminal Baath Party in charge. I was asked the other day ... why do you think the administration decided to spare Saddam Hussein ... and I said I think because they thought they might need him again...
Christopher Hitchens
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."
Christopher Hitchens
It‘s [Fahrenheit 9/11] the work of a moral cretin and a political idiot. And it's up to the Democratic National Committee to say, do they want to continue being photographed with this man as we go into a very important election, not just in the United States, I might add, but first Democratic elections to be held in Iraq and in Afghanistan? In a few months, we will know the outcome of all these. In all three cases, Michael Moore says that the enemy is George Bush and Saddam Hussein and Mr. Zarqawi and Mr. Bin Laden are no problem. Indeed, they are-what a wonderful way to celebrate the Fourth of July weekend, by the way. Indeed, they are the Minutemen. They‘re the staunch American revolutionaries. Does he tell this to the widows that he goes and exploits?
Christopher Hitchens
We can be as sure as we could probably need be that neither this enormous explosion that set the universe in motion, which is still moving away from us at a great rate, nor this amazingly complex billion year period of evolution, we can be pretty certain it was not designed so that you and I could be meeting in this room. We are not the objects of either of these plans. These plans don't know we're here. I'm sorry to say, wouldn't know or care if we stopped being here. We have to face this alone with the equipment, intellectual and moral, that we've been given, or that we've acquired, or that is innate to us.
Christopher Hitchens
Do I, who've read Freud, know what the Future of an Illusion really is and know that religious belief is ineradicable as long as we remain a stupid, poorly-evolved mammalian species, think that some Canadian law is gonna solve this problem? Please. No, our problem is this: our pre-frontal lobes are too small, and our adrenalin glands are too big, and our thumb-finger opposition isn't all that it might be, and we're afraid of the dark, and we're afraid to die, and we believe in the truths of holy books that are so stupid and so fabricated that a child can - and all children do, as you can tell by their questions - actually see through them. And I think it should be (religion) treated with ridicule and hatred and contempt. And I claim that right.
Christopher Hitchens
Then the big white whale, Clinton. What about someone who is a war criminal, a taker of bribes from foreign dictatorships, almost certainly a rapist (plausibly accused, anyway, by three believable women, of rape), executed a black man (Ricky Ray Rector) who was so mentally retarded that he was unable to plead or to understand the charges - You're against all that, right? But you're for it when it's someone who you think is a "New Democrat".
Christopher Hitchens
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
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
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
America is preeminently a country of, if not sexual licenses... a country of sexual tolerance, a country of sexual, I... would settle for pluralism, for now. Well, the Holy Mother Church doesn't settle for that. The Holy Mother Church makes rather strict demands. The Holy Mother Church prohibits, by various edicts,... statutes, and pronouncements, all forms of sex that are not specifically devoted to the outcome of procreating further Catholics, and it enforces this with a celibate hierarchy. Now, that's fine, and it is your choice, and... as Mr. Donohue did say, no one has to join that church, but that church, where it can, does try and impose those standards on non-believers and non-members. And there will always seem, to some people, I think, something absurd in the enforcement of such statutes, especially since we know most Catholics don't observe them, by a celibate oligarchy and hierarchy.
Christopher Hitchens