The Abolition of Britain Quotes

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“Society has been reconstructed so that the most abject conformism appears to be rebellious, casually clothed, loudmouthed, safely undisciplined, speaking in the glottal accents of Estuary English. Real individualism, Tory individualism, on the other hand, is merely eccentric, barmy, bonkers, contemptible. The old Soviet Union had to pervert the whole science of psychiatry to classify its dissidents as mad. We, the soap-watching, admass conformist society,26 happily join in to deride free thought and suppress heresy. And while we do it, we think we are being rebellious. What an achievement—the power of totalitarianism without the need to imprison, torture or exile.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“The older cruelty, which took the ugly form of workhouses, shame and stigma, was hard to bear because it required active harshness from the state and from individuals. The new cruelty, which leaves hundreds of thousands of children without a proper family, is imposed through many acts of generosity by the state and the taxpayers, and through the broad-minded tolerance of individuals and opinion-formers. It is therefore easier to bear in a society which has nationalized its conscience.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“There may still have been an ‘establishment’ of snobbery, church, monarchy, clubland and old-school-tie links in 1961. There was no such thing ten years later, but it suited the comics and all reformers to pretend that there was and to continue to attack this mythical thing. After all, if there were no snobbery, no crusty old aristocrats and cobwebbed judges, what was the moral justification for all this change, change which benefited the reformers personally by making them rich, famous and influential?”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“Humour and comedy have become a virtual monopoly of the cultural Left, because only they would ever seek to politicize humour in a free society. The only good conservative political jokes tend to come from countries under socialist oppression.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“For the first time this century, the young are not inheriting prejudices, opinions, values, morals and habits from their parents. The continuity, which once ensured that most people followed their families in such things, has been broken. The post-revolutionary generation, whose families have often disintegrated and are usually weak, whose schools do not uphold authority or tradition, whose religious experience and understanding often do not exist, has also grown up with several immensely strong outside influences, all of them radical enemies of existing culture. The same generation has had little chance to develop its own critical, personal imagination through reading, and so has been a blank page on which the revolutionaries have been able to scrawl their own slogans.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“Anyone who can control a major television channel can use it to pour out propaganda, but it is only this new generation which does not know how to resist it, provided it uses the right sort of codes, language and symbols. None of these codes, languages or symbols are conservative, or can be used by a conservative, because they are ‘subversive’ of the imagined ‘authority’ of a mythical ‘establishment’, which of course includes the Tories”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“By...handing children the fruit of the tree of knowledge unmediated by adult wisdom, we have abandoned our young to powers and influences which we cannot control, and whose strength we do not know. To leave a child unsupervised in front of a television set is no less dangerous than giving it neat gin, or putting it within reach of narcotics.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“If the child needs a smack, he is a free individual who has overstepped the line. If he needs a child guidance clinic, there is something wrong with him which must be cured. 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—a rather sickening thought for the reactionary who does not care what is in his neighbour’s heart provided he obeys the law. The same war between different principles lies behind the different ways of dealing with criminals, punishment versus rehabilitation, which have confronted each other throughout the century. This is revolutionary stuff, presented as kindness, undoubtedly the best way to present it, though not necessarily the most truthful way.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

“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

“The freer a society is, the more it leaves the family alone.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana