And Yet ... Quotes

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“The United States makes large claims for itself, among them the claim that the nation is the model for a society based simultaneously on democracy and multiethnicity. It’s certainly no exaggeration to say that on the success or failure of this principle much else depends. But there must be better ways of affirming it than by clinging to an insipid parody of a two-party system that counts as a virtue the ability to escape thorny questions and postpone larger ones.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“PATRIOTIC AND TRIBAL feelings belong to the squalling childhood of the human race, and become no more charming in their senescence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the “infinite capacity for taking pains” that Thomas Carlyle once described as the constituent of genius.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“George Orwell once observed that if Napoléon Bonaparte had been cut down by a musket ball as he entered Moscow, he would have been remembered as the greatest general since Alexander.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“he despised the alternative flow of information and insight, which was gossip and rumor. Like Winston Smith, he was first and foremost activated by a raging thirst to know: a thirst that could only be slaked by a personal quest for the least varnished version of the truth.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“Our Christian enthusiasts are evidently too stupid, as well as too insecure, to appreciate this. A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“No less an authority than Lavrenty Beria attacked the excesses of the Hungarian secret police (which must have stung a bit),”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet: Essays

“The Diebold company, which also manufactures ATMs, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet: Essays

“As soon as I entered the room, he cried out, without any other greeting: "You've gotten very fat!" It was his way of disarming, I thought, any horror I might have felt at his own pudding-like rotundity, which had trebled since I had seen him last.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...

“TAKE THE ROOM-TEMPERATURE op-ed article that you have read lately, or may be reading now, or will scan in the future. Cast your eye down as far as the sentence that tells you there will be no terminus to Muslim discontent until there has been a solution to the problem of Palestine. Take any writing implement that comes to hand, strike out the word “Palestine,” and insert “Kashmir.” Then spend as much time as you can afford in elucidating the subject. And then . .”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“Embraced by a couple of guys near the beer stand, I soon came to appreciate that they were using me the way drunks use lampposts: in other words, more for support than illumination.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“Synthetic outrage is de rigueur in the world of American cable-TV news, and I was almost as surprised by the authenticity of my own fury as I had been by the extreme inexpensiveness of Buchanan’s ambush. More than two decades in Washington—and all that time beseeched by Buchanan to be a guest! Three children born in the country, and all three as American as the day is long! An unblemished record of compliance with boring correspondence from the IRS! As the blush of anger left my cheek, however, I dimly realized that I was not resentful of Buchanan’s abuse of his own hypocritical hospitality. Rather, I felt that my very own hearth was being profaned. Don’t be telling me to go home, big boy. I am home. Seething a little more in the limo that bore me away, I understood why I had not even thought of one possible riposte: “Don’t you take that tone with me, you German-Irish fascist windbag. I don’t have to justify my presence to riffraff like you. Tell it to Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh—and meanwhile, don’t stab our boys in Iraq in the back.” Had I said that, or anything like it, I would truly have been sorry, at the time as well as later. (On the other hand, I shall always covertly wish I had said it—though had I done so, the prefix to “bag” would not have been “wind.” One hopes to keep one’s well of meticulous English pure and undefiled; but then again, there’s no demotic abuse like American demotic abuse.)”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays