Hitchens is also a militant atheist, or as he prefers to term it "anti-theist." I wish it were not so, because I'd love to have Hitchens' rapier wit and bohemian elegance on our side.
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Dinesh D'SouzaChristopher Hitchens
» Christopher Hitchens - all quotes »
Hitchens maintains that that "there is a close fit between the democratically minded and the pro-American" in the Middle East - like "President for Life" Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan...that [referring to 9/11] "Washington finally grasped that "there were `root causes behind the murder-attacks" [emphasis in original] (but didn't Hitchens ridicule any allusion to "root causes" as totalitarian apologetics?)...that "racism" is "anti-American as nearly as possible by definition"...that "evil" can be defined as "the surplus value of the psychopath"...is there a Bartlett's for worst quotations?
Christopher Hitchens
Long ago he came out against abortion. Interesting! Then he discovered and made quite a kosher meal of the fact that his mother, deceased, was Jewish, which under Jewish law meant he himself was Jewish. Interesting!! (He was notorious at the time for his anti-Zionist sympathies.) In the 1990s, Hitchens was virulently, and somewhat inexplicably, hostile to President Bill Clinton. Interesting!!! You would have thought that Clinton’s decadence — the thing that bothered other liberals and leftists the most — would have positively appealed to Hitchens. Finally and recently, he became the most (possibly the only) intellectually serious non-neocon supporter of George W. Bush’s Iraq war. Interesting!!!! ... Well, ladies and gentlemen, Hitchens is either playing the contrarian at a very high level or possibly he is even sincere.
Christopher Hitchens
"Tell me," said the atheist, "Is there a God — really?"
Said the master, "If you want me to be perfectly honest with you, I will not answer."
Later the disciples demanded to know why he had not answered.
"Because the question is unanswerable," said the Master.
"So you are an atheist?"
"Certainly not. The atheist makes the mistake of denying that of which nothing may be said... and the theist makes the mistake of affirming it.Anthony de Mello
So only atheists are in a comfortable position to cast the first stone, and Christopher Hitchens, in "God Is Not Great," relishes the role. He has the credentials, as both a combative journalist and a surprisingly erudite literary scholar, and he wants to break the diplomacy barrier and expose the preposterous presumptions and ignoble machinations that stain the history of all religions, bringing discredit that tends to get magnified over the years by a persistent pattern of coverup, veils of illusion , and denial of one design or another. These efforts at obfuscation are quite transparent under Hitchens' s merciless scrutiny, and the results are often quite comical.
Christopher Hitchens
In person, as on the page, Hitchens is in masterly possession of what he calls saeva indignatio, that "combination of cheek and anger to point out how the world falls short of its pretensions". He is a skilled orator, working, as far as I could see, without a text or notes. He chooses his weapons carefully, and is efficient either as a sniper or as a bombardier unloading the full arsenal of his invective. But he is also a barnum, of the type so congenial to that quintessentially American tradition of cracker-barrel salesmanship. When an elderly woman rises to challenge Hitchens, he quips: "Mother, I told you not to do this." Thus her question is deflected, amid the general laughter of an audience who are now behaving as so many valets to this lofty wit.
Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens, Christopher
Hitchens, Peter
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