Christopher Hitchens

Quotes

1. The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for "peace through strength" has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog.

2. 

   The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient.

3. 

   Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

4. 

   "Peace through Strength," surely history's most exploded nostrum.

5. 

   If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

   p. 91

6. 

   The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

7. 

   All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.

8. 

   Perhaps the values of socialists can only be realized by socialists in a nonsocialist society.

9. 

   In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

10. 

    ...those who say I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.

    p. 88

11. 

    The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. "Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process?"

12. 

    There is a reason for the affected profession of "anarchist sympathies" among Tories and grandees, and of "libertarian principles" by Hobbesian yahoos of the right. Among the former, one sees the upholding of the view that a gentleman's business and property are his own, and none of the government's. Among the latter, a distaste for democracy, for taxation, and for the need to consult others about the planet.