Search quotes

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
06192f3	I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that , in his second novel, , published in 1935, had borrowed from for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading ..	literature influence trafalgar-square ulysses-novel james-joyce george-orwell literary-criticism	Christopher Hitchens
d9ccef5	There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don't much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish..	christianity christendom intermarriages jewish-question law-of-return leo-strauss mosaic-law nuremberg-laws victor-klemperer exile religious-conversions civilisation christians israeli-palestinian-conflict muslims atheism fascism honour islam redemption ancestry antisemitism israel jerusalem	Christopher Hitchens
424adfb	Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life. The disease is pervasive, from the weird obsession with virginity and the one-way birth canal through which prophets are "delivered," through the horror of menstrual blood, all the way to the fascinated disgust with homosexuality and the preten..		Christopher Hitchens
5990b12	T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.		Christopher Hitchens
1d904b3	I, for example, recently finished writing an article about the latest wave of "home-grown" Islamic suicide-murderers. It was impossible not to notice one thing that their profiles and Web sites had in common. All of them complained about the impossibility of finding a woman, or sometimes a woman of sufficient piety. Meanwhile their public propaganda was hot with disgust and indignation at the phenomenon of female inchastity. The connection ..	sexual-frustration terrorists sigmund-freud repression freud virginity piety fanaticism	Christopher Hitchens
c450dab	Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves. Xenophanes		Christopher Hitchens
1f993c8	It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book ] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the ques..	good-and-evil jesus politics religion god philosophy omnibenevolence omnipotence norman-mailer theology theism monarchy reincarnation capitalism democracy communism devil	Christopher Hitchens
4d7d917	Consider the great . is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like or the Chicago-based , who object t..	racism history huckleberry-finn mark-twain imperialism united-states	Christopher Hitchens
029385b	Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or for..	candide henry-kissinger turkish-invasion-of-cyprus turkey naivete war-crimes cyprus voltaire crime self-esteem	Christopher Hitchens
2cd7942	How much vanity must be concealed - not too effectively at that - in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?	vanity	Christopher Hitchens
90c01f9	Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It's not that I terribly symp..	humanism politics religion dflp moscow dogmatism orwell liberation middle-east edward-said soviet-union rationality palestine palestinians religious-extremism communism	Christopher Hitchens
d9ccefd	And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmu..	revenge history czechoslovakia david-szmulevski east-germany hungary jewish-diaspora red-army secret-police nazis germans poland stalin camus eastern-europe israel jews ideology communism	Christopher Hitchens
512cc6a	The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them.	politics elections politics-of-the-united-states	Christopher Hitchens
6efbbea	During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was ..	humour religion city-councils croats david-rieff islamic-extremism serbs sontag zenica extremism bosnia bosnian-war muslims intellectuals jews religious-extremism zealotry	Christopher Hitchens
1aa703b	The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can't be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.	politics corruption	Christopher Hitchens
9163dd5	I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it's been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia. Near the southernmost city of Kaesong, captured by the North ..	religion caprice confucianism farce karl-marx queen-noguk tomb-of-king-kongmin veneration-of-the-dead vladimir-lenin absolutism totalitarianism korea nationalism xenophobia cruelty kim-il-sung kim-jong-il north-korea ideology communism	Christopher Hitchens
98a1c54	Thus in order to be a "radical" one must be open to the possibility that one's own core assumptions are misconceived." --	false humility radical	Christopher Hitchens
e24bd1c	It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms--like 'Stalinism,' say--just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought t..	history religion cults-of-personality death-of-osama-bin-laden napoleon adolf-hitler theocracy osama-bin-laden september-11-attacks jihad terrorism stalinism liberty islam islamism evil	Christopher Hitchens
abbb53f	I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the dev..		Christopher Hitchens
df297e8	So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don't live up to their apparent billing.		Christopher Hitchens
4dcb552	So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to them. I ..	ba-athist-iraq crime-family genocide-convention nationalisation nuclear-reactor-technology privatisation wmd national-socialism militarism psychopaths serial-killers genocide oil bill-clinton ba-ath-party invasion-of-kuwait iraq kuwait united-nations iraq-war stalinism fascism	Christopher Hitchens
f486b09	One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, ma..	jealousy war suffering christianity jesus religion bible grandmothers biblical-covenant divine-retribution edith-stein false-modesty hellenism hiwi-al-balkhi masochism passover passover-seder rabbis rationalisation six-day-war theodicy western-wall will-of-god exile gentiles judaism martyrdom arrogance holocaust punishment atheism self-respect children jerusalem secularism wine survivors	Christopher Hitchens
377078c	People keep saying, "God is in the details". He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence."		Christopher Hitchens
ba9523c	One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did--this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants--they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had ..	trousers world-war-ii	Christopher Hitchens
2acd456	Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by i..	morality politics american-imperialism anti-americanism africa iraq-war british-empire imperialism united-states slave-trade caribbean britain	Christopher Hitchens
0ec95dd	Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: "If you stop telling lies about me I'll stop telling the truth about you."		Christopher Hitchens
33a41ac	Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him.	marxism leon-trotsky trotskyism	Christopher Hitchens
2d24d43	The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.		Christopher Hitchens
fb4fa86	In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable,		Christopher Hitchens
dedc406	The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that ..	war christianity politics religion balkans bertolt-brecht halliburton persecution-of-muslims the-weekly-standard trent-lott bosnia bosnian-war kosovo kosovo-war slobodan-milosevic bill-clinton jihad saddam-hussein ethnicity neoconservatism dictatorship catholicism liberalism islam revolution leftism persecution	Christopher Hitchens
87537a5	There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation.		Christopher Hitchens
ae2bee7	At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.	tautology mysticism	Christopher Hitchens
ab49eaa	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."		Christopher Hitchens
edbe47c	The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed;..	war politics 1976 2000 2001 axe-murder-incident chinese-people korean-peninsula land-mines ottawa-treaty seoul sichuan taedong-river united-states-and-wmd united-states-army uss-pueblo-ager-2 totalitarianism korean-demilitarized-zone korean-war mao-zedong south-korea nuclear-weapons pyongyang united-states madeleine-albright washington-dc kim-il-sung kim-jong-il north-korea china	Christopher Hitchens
bdd556c	On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god.		Christopher Hitchens
064eb99	Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of god and those that demonstrate the ill effects of religion. It might be better if I broadened this somewhat, and said those that dispute the existence of an intervening god. Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be ..		Christopher Hitchens
984c8f8	During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Any..	money lies history women politics presidents us-presidents chauvinism democratic-party-us impeachment new-democrats republican-party-us us-presidential-election-1992 us-senate impeachment-of-bill-clinton pathology new-hampshire carol-blue bill-clinton elections united-states corruption trials misogyny sexism	Christopher Hitchens
72aa5b2	T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-A..	united-states	Christopher Hitchens
589f875	British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words 'Special Relationship' to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow.	foreign-relations foreign-relations-of-the-us uk-us-relations washington united-states superstition britain diplomacy	Christopher Hitchens
59ff8dd	Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too 'Western.' It was very noticeable among the Palestinians that the most demonstrably 'extreme' nationalists--and Marxists--were often from Christian backgrounds. George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh used to be celebrated examples of this phenomenon, long..	christianity arab-nationalism george-habash hamas islamic-jihad marxists nationalists nayef-hawatmeh overcompensation secularists christians edward-said nationalism arabs palestinians	Christopher Hitchens
74920fc	All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.		Christopher Hitchens
14bc41f	The holy book in the longest continuous use--the Talmud--commands the observant one to thank his maker every day that he was not born a woman.		Christopher Hitchens
694e2c6	Generally it must be stated that realpolitik has been better at dividing than at ruling. Take it as a whole since Kissinger called on the Shah in 1972, and see what the harvest has been.	realpolitik	Christopher Hitchens
e916337	I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as 'Abu Nidal' ('father of struggle'), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat's main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when Abu Nidal asked me if I would like to be trained in one of his camps. No thanks, I explained. From this awkward beginning there was a further decline. I was then asked if I knew Said Hammami, the envoy of the PLO in London. I did in fact know hi..	war politics interviews military-training plo said-hammami the-times two-state-solution arafat middle-east iraq israel london palestine china	Christopher Hitchens

06192f3

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that , in his second novel, , published in 1935, had borrowed from for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading ..

literature influence trafalgar-square ulysses-novel james-joyce george-orwell literary-criticism

Christopher Hitchens

d9ccef5

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don't much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish..

christianity christendom intermarriages jewish-question law-of-return leo-strauss mosaic-law nuremberg-laws victor-klemperer exile religious-conversions civilisation christians israeli-palestinian-conflict muslims atheism fascism honour islam redemption ancestry antisemitism israel jerusalem

Christopher Hitchens

424adfb

Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life. The disease is pervasive, from the weird obsession with virginity and the one-way birth canal through which prophets are "delivered," through the horror of menstrual blood, all the way to the fascinated disgust with homosexuality and the preten..

Christopher Hitchens

5990b12

T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

Christopher Hitchens

1d904b3

I, for example, recently finished writing an article about the latest wave of "home-grown" Islamic suicide-murderers. It was impossible not to notice one thing that their profiles and Web sites had in common. All of them complained about the impossibility of finding a woman, or sometimes a woman of sufficient piety. Meanwhile their public propaganda was hot with disgust and indignation at the phenomenon of female inchastity. The connection ..

sexual-frustration terrorists sigmund-freud repression freud virginity piety fanaticism

Christopher Hitchens

c450dab

Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves. Xenophanes

Christopher Hitchens

1f993c8

It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book ] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the ques..

good-and-evil jesus politics religion god philosophy omnibenevolence omnipotence norman-mailer theology theism monarchy reincarnation capitalism democracy communism devil

Christopher Hitchens

4d7d917

Consider the great . is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like or the Chicago-based , who object t..

racism history huckleberry-finn mark-twain imperialism united-states

Christopher Hitchens

029385b

Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or for..

candide henry-kissinger turkish-invasion-of-cyprus turkey naivete war-crimes cyprus voltaire crime self-esteem

Christopher Hitchens

2cd7942

How much vanity must be concealed - not too effectively at that - in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

vanity

Christopher Hitchens

90c01f9

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It's not that I terribly symp..

humanism politics religion dflp moscow dogmatism orwell liberation middle-east edward-said soviet-union rationality palestine palestinians religious-extremism communism

Christopher Hitchens

d9ccefd

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmu..

revenge history czechoslovakia david-szmulevski east-germany hungary jewish-diaspora red-army secret-police nazis germans poland stalin camus eastern-europe israel jews ideology communism

Christopher Hitchens

512cc6a

The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them.

politics elections politics-of-the-united-states

Christopher Hitchens

6efbbea

During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was ..

humour religion city-councils croats david-rieff islamic-extremism serbs sontag zenica extremism bosnia bosnian-war muslims intellectuals jews religious-extremism zealotry

Christopher Hitchens

1aa703b

The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can't be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.

politics corruption

Christopher Hitchens

9163dd5

I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it's been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia. Near the southernmost city of Kaesong, captured by the North ..

religion caprice confucianism farce karl-marx queen-noguk tomb-of-king-kongmin veneration-of-the-dead vladimir-lenin absolutism totalitarianism korea nationalism xenophobia cruelty kim-il-sung kim-jong-il north-korea ideology communism

Christopher Hitchens

98a1c54

Thus in order to be a "radical" one must be open to the possibility that one's own core assumptions are misconceived." --

false humility radical

Christopher Hitchens

e24bd1c

It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms--like 'Stalinism,' say--just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought t..

history religion cults-of-personality death-of-osama-bin-laden napoleon adolf-hitler theocracy osama-bin-laden september-11-attacks jihad terrorism stalinism liberty islam islamism evil

Christopher Hitchens

abbb53f

I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the dev..

Christopher Hitchens

df297e8

So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don't live up to their apparent billing.

Christopher Hitchens

4dcb552

So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to them. I ..

ba-athist-iraq crime-family genocide-convention nationalisation nuclear-reactor-technology privatisation wmd national-socialism militarism psychopaths serial-killers genocide oil bill-clinton ba-ath-party invasion-of-kuwait iraq kuwait united-nations iraq-war stalinism fascism

Christopher Hitchens

f486b09

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, ma..

jealousy war suffering christianity jesus religion bible grandmothers biblical-covenant divine-retribution edith-stein false-modesty hellenism hiwi-al-balkhi masochism passover passover-seder rabbis rationalisation six-day-war theodicy western-wall will-of-god exile gentiles judaism martyrdom arrogance holocaust punishment atheism self-respect children jerusalem secularism wine survivors

Christopher Hitchens

377078c

People keep saying, "God is in the details". He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence."

Christopher Hitchens

ba9523c

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did--this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants--they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had ..

trousers world-war-ii

Christopher Hitchens

2acd456

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by i..

morality politics american-imperialism anti-americanism africa iraq-war british-empire imperialism united-states slave-trade caribbean britain

Christopher Hitchens

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Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: "If you stop telling lies about me I'll stop telling the truth about you."

Christopher Hitchens

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Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him.

marxism leon-trotsky trotskyism

Christopher Hitchens

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The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.

Christopher Hitchens

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In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable,

Christopher Hitchens

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The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that ..

war christianity politics religion balkans bertolt-brecht halliburton persecution-of-muslims the-weekly-standard trent-lott bosnia bosnian-war kosovo kosovo-war slobodan-milosevic bill-clinton jihad saddam-hussein ethnicity neoconservatism dictatorship catholicism liberalism islam revolution leftism persecution

Christopher Hitchens

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There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation.

Christopher Hitchens

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At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.

tautology mysticism

Christopher Hitchens

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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."

Christopher Hitchens

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The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed;..

war politics 1976 2000 2001 axe-murder-incident chinese-people korean-peninsula land-mines ottawa-treaty seoul sichuan taedong-river united-states-and-wmd united-states-army uss-pueblo-ager-2 totalitarianism korean-demilitarized-zone korean-war mao-zedong south-korea nuclear-weapons pyongyang united-states madeleine-albright washington-dc kim-il-sung kim-jong-il north-korea china

Christopher Hitchens

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On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god.

Christopher Hitchens

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Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of god and those that demonstrate the ill effects of religion. It might be better if I broadened this somewhat, and said those that dispute the existence of an intervening god. Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be ..

Christopher Hitchens

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During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Any..

money lies history women politics presidents us-presidents chauvinism democratic-party-us impeachment new-democrats republican-party-us us-presidential-election-1992 us-senate impeachment-of-bill-clinton pathology new-hampshire carol-blue bill-clinton elections united-states corruption trials misogyny sexism

Christopher Hitchens

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T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-A..

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Christopher Hitchens

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British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words 'Special Relationship' to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow.

foreign-relations foreign-relations-of-the-us uk-us-relations washington united-states superstition britain diplomacy

Christopher Hitchens

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Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too 'Western.' It was very noticeable among the Palestinians that the most demonstrably 'extreme' nationalists--and Marxists--were often from Christian backgrounds. George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh used to be celebrated examples of this phenomenon, long..

christianity arab-nationalism george-habash hamas islamic-jihad marxists nationalists nayef-hawatmeh overcompensation secularists christians edward-said nationalism arabs palestinians

Christopher Hitchens

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All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.

Christopher Hitchens

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The holy book in the longest continuous use--the Talmud--commands the observant one to thank his maker every day that he was not born a woman.

Christopher Hitchens

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Generally it must be stated that realpolitik has been better at dividing than at ruling. Take it as a whole since Kissinger called on the Shah in 1972, and see what the harvest has been.

realpolitik

Christopher Hitchens

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I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as 'Abu Nidal' ('father of struggle'), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat's main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when Abu Nidal asked me if I would like to be trained in one of his camps. No thanks, I explained. From this awkward beginning there was a further decline. I was then asked if I knew Said Hammami, the envoy of the PLO in London. I did in fact know hi..

war politics interviews military-training plo said-hammami the-times two-state-solution arafat middle-east iraq israel london palestine china

Christopher Hitchens