Home > Work > The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
41 " [Orwell’s] very ordinariness is the sterling guarantee that we need no saintly representative consciences. We would do better to make sterner use of our own. "
― Christopher Hitchens , The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
42 " Of course, the most flagrant offenders against morality and common sense are still the nihilistic pseudo-leftists, who claim to see no real difference between Western democracy and those who desire to murder its voters at random. "
43 " Quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There’s a general tendency—not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them—to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one. "
44 " All societies that have tried to keep themselves ‘pure,’ from the Confucian Chinese through to the Castilian Spanish to the post-Wilhelmine Germans, have collapsed into barbarism, insularity and superstition. And swiftly enough for us to be certain that the fall was no more connected to the genes than was the rise. There is no gene for I.Q., and there is no genetic or evolutionary timing that is short enough to explain histories or societies. "
45 " [Death is] one thing one is certainly born to do. "
46 " those who call for ‘English Only’ believe themselves to be speaking English when they are mounting a mediocre patois, "
― , The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
47 " The measure of an education,” you write elsewhere, “is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.” And that’s all that “agnosticism” really means: it is an acknowledgment of ignorance. "
48 " The test of a well-conducted argument is not its ability to convert or to persuade. It lies in its capacity to refine or to redefine the positions of the other side. "
49 " Some people say it’s a sign of intelligence to be able to keep two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time, and it can be a sign of intelligence. It can also be a sign of stupidity, or of unwillingness to make up the mind. "
50 " Every advance in human civilization, from the spread of science and literacy to the abolition of slavery, has had to meet the objection that it violated God-given laws. "