How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape. - Christopher Hitchens

" "

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

English
Collect this quote

About Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an-English-American journalist and writer. He contributed to the New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure and public intellectual.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Birth Name: Christopher Eric Hitchens
Also Known As: Hitch
Go Premium

Support Quotewise while enjoying an ad-free experience and premium features.

View Plans

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Additional quotes by Christopher Hitchens

In an interview with Alex O'Connor at about 59 minutes the discussion turned to deathbed conversions where Richard Dawkins said, "Religious apologists are so eager to get deathbed conversions that you have to watch it. Well actually, Christopher I think himself said that, 'if anybody claims to that I had a deathbed conversion you can be absolutely sure that I wasn't in my right mind when its happened'."

Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI

Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building — as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago — and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom' — one of Yvonne's stock phrases — makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

Loading...