Christopher Hitchens Quotes

The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship — though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…

I used to find in arguments about Iraq that I knew right away when someone didn’t know what they were talking about. The dead giveaway would always be when they would say, "Alright, I agree, Saddam Hussein is a bad guy." I said, "That means you don’t know anything about him, if that’s what you think. You don’t know what it would be like to be sitting at home wondering where your daughter was and finding out because the police came round and, banging on the door, handed you a video, while they stood there, of her being raped by their colleagues, just to show you who was boss." The word evil … I think does need a bit of justification. Many people think that to even use the word evil is sort of naïve, or morally too judgmental, or … too simplistic. And yet it’s somehow a word without which we cannot do. Hannah Arendt, in her study of totalitarianism, borrowed from Immanuel Kant the concept of radical evil, of evil that’s so evil that in the end it destroys itself. It’s so committed to evil, it’s so committed to hatred and cruelty, that it becomes suicidal. My definition of it is the surplus value that’s generated by totalitarianism. It means you do more violence, more cruelty than you absolutely have to to stay in power. You’ve already made your point. You’ve done everything you need to do to make people realize that you’re in power, but you somehow can’t stop. There has to be a special appetite. There must be special prisons for rape. There must be special graves, mass graves, just for children. There must be the desire to see how far you can go. And even if you know this will, in the end, bring retribution, it’s worth it, in some sense, for its own sake. Maybe that’s the only redeeming thing about it. Maybe the irrationality is the one saving grace of it, but at any rate, it’s not a word, it seems, that we can abolish from our vocabulary.

Donald Trump – a ludicrous figure, but at least he’s lived it up a bit in the real world and at least he’s worked out how to cover 90 per cent of his skull with 30 per cent of his hair.

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.

Bear in mind that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first-class clinics in Bengal. The decision not to do so, and indeed to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.

The progress that's made … in any argument or in any discussion is by confrontation. That's a dialectical fact. People say "oh let's have less heat and more light," fatuously. There's only one source of light. It happens to be heat.

It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.

Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature)...said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched...said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R...professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you"...used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars...used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps. There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war...allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling."..sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck...then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too...then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.) One could go on...This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.

Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked.

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.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

I once heard Susan Sontag, in conversation with Umberto Eco, define the polymath as one “who is interested in everything, and in nothing else.”

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.