Christopher Hitchens

Author

1949-04-13 – 2011-01-01

Quotes by Christopher Hitchens

• The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.

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• One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no people waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either.

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• There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.

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• Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.

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• The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

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• Madeleine Albright has said that there is 'a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.' What are the implications of this statement? Would it be an argument in favor of the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton? Would this mean that Elizabeth Edwards and Michelle Obama don't deserve the help of fellow females? If the Republicans nominated a woman would Ms. Albright instantly switch parties out of sheer sisterhood? Of course not. (And this wearisome tripe from someone who was once our secretary of state ...)

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• Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faintly sinister— that redolence of moral blackmail that adheres to certain charitable appeals and certain kinds of politician. (Not for nothing is baby-kissing the synonym for public insincerity.)

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• I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking.

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• The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

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• His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he —took on,' and stayed with, and never abandoned. As a consequence, we commonly use the term "Orwellian' in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as "Orwellian' is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as —Orwellian' is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime.

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• His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.

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• The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

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• As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases— doublethink, thought police, 'Some animals are more equal than others'— that he embedded in our language and in our minds. In Orwell's own mind there was an inextricable connection between language and truth, a conviction that by using plain and unambiguous words one could forbid oneself the comfort of certain falsehoods and delusions. Every time you hear a piece of psychobabble or propaganda— 'people's princess,' say, or 'collateral damage,' or 'peace initiative'— it is good to have a well-thumbed collection of his essays nearby. His main enemy in discourse was euphemism, just as his main enemy in practice was the abuse of power, and (more important) the slavish willingness of people to submit to it.

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• Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu— actually of the prices not the courses— outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember).

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• In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.

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• The finest fury is the most controlled.

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• Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide— one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave— of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

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• On page 607, alluding to the end of my first marriage (and carefully remembering to state that that's none of his business), he very sweetly says that I 'might leave a wife, but not a friend.' Nice try. Neat smear. But he shouldn't be so sure....

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• It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

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• The fragility of love is what is most at stake here— humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed— but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

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