Christopher Hitchens

Quotes

1. Compulsory bad taste isn’t a good cultural sign either.

2. 

   He could see events being mutated into propaganda before his very eyes, even in the information headquarters of an ostensible democracy.

3. 

   I once tried to write an article, perhaps rather straining for effect, describing the experience as too much like living for four weeks in the atmosphere of a one-party state. “Come on,” I hear you say. But by how much would I be exaggerating? The same songs and music played everywhere, all the time. The same uniform slogans and exhortations, endlessly displayed and repeated. The same sentimental stress on the sheer joy of having a Dear Leader to adore. As I pressed on I began almost to persuade myself. The serried ranks of beaming schoolchildren, chanting the same uplifting mush. The cowed parents, in terror of being unmasked by their offspring for insufficient participation in the glorious events. . . . “Come on,” yourself. How wrong am I?

4. 

   The diplomatic commonplace term “tilt”—signifying that mixture of signals and nuances and codes that describe a foreign policy preference that is often too embarrassing to be openly avowed—actually originates in this dire episode.

5. 

   And, permanently tempted though he was by cynicism and despair, Orwell also believed in the latent possession of these faculties by those we sometimes have the nerve to call “ordinary people.” Here, then, is some of the unpromising bedrock—hardscrabble soil in Scotland, gritty coal mines in Yorkshire, desert landscapes in Africa, soulless slums and bureaucratic offices—combined with the richer soil and loam of ever-renewing nature, and that tiny, irreducible core of the human personality that somehow manages to put up a resistance to deceit and coercion. Out of the endless attrition between them can come such hope as we may reasonably claim to possess.

6. 

   Schlesinger had written the Kennedy campaign’s anti-biography of Nixon for the election of 1960, and had come to the view that he was “the greatest shit in 20th century American politics (the “20th century” bit is pure scholarly caution; I cannot at the moment think of anyone in the 19th century quite meeting Nixon’s combination of sanctimoniousness and squalor).”

7. 

   I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

8. 

   The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.

9. 

   As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be "me." (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

10. 

    To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

11. 

    That phrase, "loss of innocence," has become stale with overuse and diminishing returns; no other culture is so addicted to this narcissistic impression of itself as having any innocence to lose in the first place.

12. 

    My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.