Peter Hitchens > Quotes

“Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?”
― Peter Hitchens

“Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.

And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.”
― Peter Hitchens

“The problem of utopia is that it can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never arrive.”
― Peter Hitchens

“I think it is important for our society to wonder why it has lately become so ready to accept that human woe can be cured or soothed by chemicals. These chemicals do not alter or reform the ills of our civilisation. They adapt the human being to them.”
― Peter Hitchens, The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs

“Far too many people—many of them academics, many politicians—continue to jabber about a supposed 'special relationship' between our two countries.

I used to think that no such thing existed. Recently, I have become convinced that it does, and that it is in fact a Specially Bad Relationship.”
― Peter Hitchens

“It did not then cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief. It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it. Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“In my early teens, [my grandfather] would sometimes stomp around his living room, where he used to shave towards mid-day with bowl, brush and open razor, deriding my ignorance and mocking the made-up discipline of sociology, which I at one stage claimed to be studying. 'What is sociology?' he roared derisively, twisting and rolling the silly word on his Hampshire tongue. I knew, alas, that he was quite right.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“If you drive God out the world then you create a howling wilderness.”


(Copyright:www.changinglives.au.com)”
― Peter Hitchens

“The US constitution is like Washington DC, a matter of columns and beautiful design, the English constitution is more like a forest, you can't build a forest, you can easily cut it down, and that is what we're doing, we're cutting down a forest that we can't rebuild.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“The Bolsheviks killed their own most loyal supporters at Kronstadt in 1921, because they failed to understand that the revolution no longer required revolutionaries, but obedient servants.”
― Peter Hitchens

“I concede to my atheist opponents that belief or unbelief is a choice. As a choice, it is based upon desire. I desire, and therefore choose to believe in, one kind of universe, one that has laws and purpose with justice woven into its very fabric. The unbeliever desires, and therefore chooses to believe in, a chaotic universe where the dead remain dead and actions have no effect beyond their immediately observable consequences.”
― Peter Hitchens

“I happen to think Israel is in many ways a noble enterprise, worth defending and supporting, and that Israel's fashionable enemies in the West have allied themselves with some of the nastiest and most bigoted forces now loose in the world.”
― Peter Hitchens, Short Breaks in Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribbler's Life

“We must decide whether to act as if the universe is a cosmic car-crash, in which our actions have no significance beyond their observable effects, or an ordered and purposeful whole, in which our actions continue to echo and reverberate down all eternity.”
― Peter Hitchens

“Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“We welcome into our homes the machines that vacuum the thoughts out of our heads and pump in someone else's. John Berger in Ways of Seeing said that television advertisers succeeded by persuading viewers to envy themselves as they would be if they bought the product. These programmes do something similar, by persuading the viewer to envy himself as he would be if his life were that little bit more exciting and melodramatic than it actually is. They can make things seem normal that are not.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“the balance of power between the sexes had been destabilized, and relations between mothers and their children transformed from a natural and accepted one to a mere option.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“This society, promoted by its leaders as an egalitarian utopia, was in truth one of the most unequal societies on earth.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“The EU is the continuation of Germany by other means”
― Peter Hitchens

“Stalin and Kim made human idols of themselves because they believed, as utopian idealists always do, in the ultimate goodness of themselves and the unchallengeable rightness of their decisions. There was no higher power, and so there could be no higher law. If people disagreed with them, it was because those people were in some way defective--insane, malignant, or mercenary. The rulers could not tolerate actual religion, because they could not tolerate any rival authority or any rival source or judge of goodness, gratitude, and justice.”
― Peter Hitchens

“Those who write where many read, and speak where many listen, had best be careful what they say. Someone is bound to take them seriously, and it really is no good pretending that you didn’t know this.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“You cannot really debate with somebody who truly despises you.”
― Peter Hitchens

“Like the pagans of old, unaffected by climate, the British were now dancing around a giant phallus. Unlike the pagans theirs was a sterile phallus, disarmed by condoms and pills - the first heathen sexual cult to be based around sterility rather than fertility.”
― Peter Hitchens

“The new brand of militant atheism...adopts a mocking and high-handed tone of certainty, sneers at its Christian opponents, and states, or implies, that they must be stupid. This style of attack conforms to the irreverent spirit of the age and so is not very carefully examined. It is not widely recognised that secularism is a fundamentally political movement, which seeks to remove the remaining traces of Christian moral law in the civil and criminal codes of the Western nations.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“Proper education is a fundamentally conservative activity, based on the assumption that a body of knowledge exists, is in the hands of the adult and educated, and can be passed on in measurable ways, by disciplined learning reinforced with authority.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“Among the favorite arguments of the irreligious, one that they almost invariably advance in their opening offensive in their attacks on faith is this: that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily ABOUT religion. By saying this the irreligious hope to establish that religion is of itself the cause of conflict. This is a crude factual misunderstanding. Some conflicts fought in the name of religion are specifically religious. Many others are not, or cannot be so simply classified. The only general lesson that can be drawn from these differing wars is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power or wealth or land.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“Increasingly I'm convinced that in a primitive society someone like me would have been clubbed to death quite early on just for being annoying.”
― Peter Hitchens

“The Bible angers and frustrates those who believe that the pursuit of a perfect society justifies the quest for absolute power.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“In a Godless universe, what is the difference between doing unto others that we would wish them to do unto us, and merely appearing to do unto others that we would wish them to do unto us? The answer, alas, is that if there is no God who knows the secrets of our hearts, it is all too easy to appear to be good, and even to do formally good deeds, all of which are empty of real goodness.”
― Peter Hitchens

“The conservative society accepts that rebellion and bad behaviour are natural and must be curbed. The liberal society requires all its citizens to be perfectly balanced, conforming to its ideals and aims with a happy heart and a willing mind”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“Our religion, such as it is, has abandoned the only territory where it could not be challenged, the saving of souls, and has given up troubling our individual consciences. Instead, it has joined in the nationalization of the human conscience, so that a man’s moral worth is now measured by the level of taxation he is willing to support, rather than by his faith or even his good works.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana