Peter Hitchens quotes - page 2
I have pursued a lone heresy of wondering why NATO even survived the end of its enemies, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Do we still maintain alliances against Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans? I can find no trace of them. Perhaps, overlooked in some elegant Paris street and living off ancient funds, elderly, learned men still occupy these joyous sinecures, hoping that they will not be found out.
Peter Hitchens
When the political history of the Blair era is written, it may well be concluded that the most effective conservative opposition came not from politicians, but journalists. It often seems that the charge against New Labour is led by the Telegraph and Spectator, by Charles Moore and Boris Johnson, or from some Murdoch journalists, rather than by William Hague. So perhaps it should not comes [sic] as a complete surprise that the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works should be a polemic by a right-wing journalist, Peter Hitchens, rather than a Tory pamhlet or an MP's speech. ...
On much of this agenda, Hitchens is simply out of time. ... [T]he idea of a widespread return to a belief in literal damnation, to public hostility towards homosexuals and the shaming of single mothers, seems utterly implausible.
Peter Hitchens
The accelerating decline of civility in Britain, which struck me very hard when I returned there in 1995 after nearly five years in Russia and the USA, has several causes. The rapid vanishing of Christianity from public consciousness and life, as the last fully Christian generation ages and disappears, seems to me to be a major part of it. I do not think I would have been half so shocked by the squalor and rudeness of 1990 Moscow, if I had not come from a country where Christian forbearance was still well-established. If I had then been able to see the London of 2010, I would have been equally shocked.
Peter Hitchens
The current intellectual assault on God in Europe and North America is in fact a specific attack on Christianity – the faith that stubbornly persists in the morality, laws, and government of the major Western countries. Despite the self-conscious militancy of some of the anti-theists against Islam, they rarely encounter organized Islam in their own countries, and are sensibly wary of challenging Islam on its own ground, and seldom debate with Muslim spokesmen (who are not interested in discussing an issue they believe to be closed). Their hostility to Islam as a ‘threat to our way of life' is a result of their late realization that it might, if it became powerful, menace the license in sexual and other matters that their cause has won, thanks to the weakness of Christianity in its former domains.
Peter Hitchens