Christopher Hitchens

Quotes

1. It was indeed Auden – who had been a master at such a school as well as having been a pupil at one – who had said that the experience had given him an instinctive understanding of what it would be like to live under fascism. (He had also said, when told by the headmaster that only “the cream” attended the school: “yes I know what you mean – thick and rich.”)

   p. 49

2. 

   Death has this much to be said for it:

   You don’t have to get out of bed for it.

   Wherever you happen to be

   They bring it to you – free.

   p. 7

3. 

   But a protestation of my innocence would have been, as in any inquisition, an additional proof of guilt.

   p. 51

4. 

   The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is “systematic.” The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong.

   p. 51

5. 

   Nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality.

   p. 5

6. 

   “The one unforgivable sin,” she used to say, “is to be boring.”

   p. 13

7. 

   The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason.

8. 

   I of course do not believe that it is Allah who determines these things. (Salman Rushdie, commenting on my book god Is Not Great, remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was a lack of economy: that it was in other words exactly one word too long.)

   p. 9

9. 

   Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of “the flock.”

   p. 10

10. 

    The connection between religion, racism, and totalitarianism is also to be found in the other most hateful dictatorship of the twentieth century: the vile system of apartheid in South Africa. ... Racism is totalitarian by definition: it marks the victim in perpetuity and denies him, or her, the right to even a rag of dignity or privacy, even the elemental; right to make love or marry or produce children with a loved one of the "wrong" tribe, without having love nullified by law.

    p. 251

11. 

    I shall again defer to a finer writer than myself and quote what H. L. Mencken irrefutably says in his Treatise on the Gods: "The simple fact is that the New Testament as we know it is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of being tampered with."

    p. 110

12. 

    The Gospel according to Luke states that the miraculous birth occurred in a year when the Emperor Caesar Augustus ordered a census for the purposes of taxation, and that this happened at a time when Herod reigned in Judaea and Quirinius was governor of Syria. That is the closest to a triangulation of historical dating that any writer even attempts. But Herod died four years "BC" and during his rulership the governor of Syria was not Quirinius. There is no mention of any Augustan census by any Roman historian, but the Jewish chronicler Josephus mentions one that did occur — without the onerous requirement for people to return to their places of birth, and six years after the birth of Jesus is supposed to have taken place.

    p. 112