Home > Author > Peter Hitchens
1 " The freer a society is, the more it leaves the family alone. "
― Peter Hitchens , The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana
2 " 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
3 " 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. "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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
8 " 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
9 " 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? "
10 " 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. "
11 " 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. "
12 " The EU is the continuation of Germany by other means "
13 " Most of the people who would have apologised for Stalin in his day have now found other causes - the cultural and sexual revolution, campaigns to tax the Western poor to provide money for Africa's rich, and above all, the intolerant and puritan secular fundamentalism that gathers around the belief in madmade global warming. "
14 " The problem of utopia is that it can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never arrive. "
15 " If you drive God out the world then you create a howling wilderness.” (Copyright:www.changinglives.au.com) "
16 " 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. "
17 " 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. "
18 " 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. "
19 " 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
20 " 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. "
