# Quote — Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22

> The centers of several British cities were choked by hysterical crowds, all demanding not just less freedom for the collective (they wanted more censorship and more restriction and the extension of an archaic blasphemy law, and more police power over publication) but also screaming for a deeply reactionary attack on the rights of the individual – the destruction of an author’s work and even the taking of an author’s life. That this ultrareactionary mobocracy was composed mainly of people with brown skins ought to have made no difference. In Pakistan, long familiar with the hysteria of the Jamaat Islami and other religio-dictatorial gangs, it would have made no difference at all. But somehow, when staged in the streets and squares of Britain, it did make a difference. A pronounced awkwardness was introduced into the atmosphere: a hinting undercurrent of menace and implied moral and racial blackmail that has never since been dispelled. It took me a long time to separate and classify the three now-distinctive elements of the new and grievance-privileged Islamist mentality, which were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred.

- Author: [Christopher Hitchens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens.md)
- Book: [Hitch 22](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22.md)
- Page: 270
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hitch-22#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22/the-centers-of-several

## More from this book

> Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked.

p. 381 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22/jerusalem-that-pest-house.md)

> I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.
>
> If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.

p. 379 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22/i-think-i-have.md)

> I suspect that the hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which “sacrifices” are justified. With some part of my self, I still “feel,” but no longer really think, that humanity would be the poorer without this fantastically potent illusion. “A map of the world that did not show Utopia,” said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting.” I used to adore that phrase, but now reflect more upon the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest has led.

p. 420 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22/i-suspect-that.md)