Christopher Hitchens

Quotes

1. Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn’t seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life – the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier – would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic.

   p. 391

2. 

   All those who have had similar or comparable experiences will recognize the problem at once: it is not possible for long to be just a little bit heretical.

   p. 295

3. 

   I did not intend to be told, I said, that the people of the United States – who included all those toiling in the Pentagon as well as all those, citizens and non-citizens, who had been immolated in Manhattan – had in any sense deserved this or brought it upon themselves. I also tried to give a name to the mirthless, medieval, death-obsessed barbarism that had so brazenly unmasked itself. It was, I said, “Fascism with an Islamic Face.”

   p. 244

4. 

   Even at the time, as I left the party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of “Thatcherism,” as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.

   p. 178

5. 

   “Sometimes the wrong people can have the right line.” I thought then that he had said more than he intended, and myself experienced the remark as a sort of emancipation from the worry, which did still occasionally nag at me, that by taking up some out-of-line position I would find myself “in bed with,” as the saying went, unsavory elements. It’s good to throw off this sort of moral blackmail and mind-forged manacle as early in life as one can.

   p. 185

6. 

   He might have done the right thing on that occasion, but I did not at all like Ronald Reagan and nobody then could persuade me that I should. Even now, when I squint back at him through the more roseate lens of his historic compromise with Gorbachev, I can easily remember (which is precisely why one’s memoirs must always strive to avoid too much retrospective lens adjustment) exactly why I found him so rebarbative at the time. There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar. He could fix the camera with a folksy smirk that I always found annoying but that got him called “The Great Communicator” by a chorus of toadies in the press, and proceed to utter the most resounding untruths.

   p. 232

7. 

   One of the claims of the Cuban revolution was to have abolished prostitution and though I had never personally believe this to be feasible (the withering away of the state being one thing but the withering away of the penis quite another), the whore scene in Santa Clara was many times more lurid than anything to be imagined in a “bourgeois” society.

   p. 115

8. 

   It was, in fact, only after the ghastly war with Iran was over that the truly horrific work in Iraqi Kurdistan had begun. Employing a Koranic verse – the one concerning the so-called Anfal, or “spoils,” specifying what may be exacted from a defeated foe – the Iraqi army and police destroyed more than 4,000 centers of population and killed at least 180,000 Kurds.

   p. 293

9. 

   In the larger world, I knew well enough, there was a challenge from Islamic extremism. It had, for example, destroyed the promise of the great Iranian revolution that pitted masses of unarmed civilians against an oil-crazed megalomaniac with a pitiless network of secret police and a huge, purchased army which in the end was too mercenary and corrupt to fight for him. At the moment when Iran stood at the threshold of modernity, a black-winged ghoul came flapping back from exile on a French jet and imposed a version of his own dark and heavy uniform on a people too long used to being bullied and ordered around. For the female population of the country, at least, the new bondage was heavier than the old.

   p. 266

10. 

    The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on – only henceforth in my absence. (It’s the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.

    p. 331

11. 

    It didn’t work so well in Salt Lake City, say, where Balliol men and Trotskyists alike were as rare as rocking-horse droppings and one had a little choice but to take the tour of the Mormon Tabernacle and notice the John Birch Society bookshop that was right next door to it. Beautiful as Salt Lake City was, with its street plan leading to white-topped horizons in every direction, and lovely as Utah was, with its main church having only just had the needful “revelation” that black people might have human souls after all, it was a slight relief to cross the frontier of Nevada and breathe the bracingly sordid and amoral air of Reno and Las Vegas.

    p. 215

12. 

    Of the numerous regrettable elements that go to make up the unlawful carnal-knowledge industry, I should single out for distinction the look of undisguised contempt that is often worn on the faces of its female staff.

    p. 165