Quotes by Christopher Hitchens

You should be nicer to him, a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. He has no friends. This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.

On page 605, Blumenthal says that I made friends with Hitchenss friends the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. True in its way. I particularly remember the occasion when he called me up and invited me to dinner with Dick Morris, but only on condition that I brought Rushdie (who was staying in my house) along with me. No Rushdie: no invitation. So I never did get to meet Dick Morris.

Should I, too, prefer the title of non-Jewish Jew? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in thinking with the blood, to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about rootless cosmopolitanism finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish characteristics? Yes, I think it must mean that.

I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated

Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, Ill mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. Ill rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying The Personal Is Political. It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and specificities. This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldnt change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that humanity (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.

I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. Its as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.

Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.

Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Dont introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.

The lawbreaking itch is not always an anarchic one. In the first place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural resistance to coercion. We dont like to be pushed and shoved, even if its in a direction we might choose to go. In the second place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural sense of the preposterous. Thus, just behind my apartment building in Washington there is an official sign saying, Drug-Free Zone. I think this comic inscription may be done because its close to a schoolyard. And a few years back, one of our suburbs announced by a municipal ordinance that it was a nuclear-free zone. I dont wish to break the first law, though if I did wish to do so it would take me, or any other local resident, no more than one phone call and a ten-minute wait. I did, at least for a while, pine to break the nuclear-free regulation, on grounds of absurdity alone, but eventually decided that it would be too much trouble.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary:Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)

Beware what you wish for, unless you have the grace to hope that your luck can be shared.

To the dumb question Why me? the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as evil. Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the support of Americas peace-mongers, was to describe a confrontation with Saddam as the lesser evil. This is a term the Left can appreciate. Indeed, lesser evil is part of the essential tactical rhetoric of todays Left, and has been deployed to excuse or overlook the sins of liberal Democrats, from President Clintons bombing of Sudan to Madeleine Albrights veto of an international rescue for Rwanda when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism—the willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it—is the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than cowboy language.

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesnt present always. I mean, often what youre meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if Id tell you why hes now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. Hes in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I dont know if Ive ever met anyone whos done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.

A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term we or us without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that we are all agreed on our interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics (our sensibilities are enraged...) Always ask who this we is; as often as not its an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron Maulana Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called US. Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was Wherever US is, We are. It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though thats not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.

Its not always a question of you changing your mind. I think very often your mind changes you. You suddenly realise that without having intended to think something, or while intending to think something, you cant quite do it anymore. It doesnt mean the same thing it used to. And you wonder why. And if you want to take an honest exploration of why that is, it may lead you in some alarming but fruitful directions. Thats actually why I called this book Hitch-22, because its a minor-key echo of the great Joe Heller paradox; but in a lifetime thats had quite a lot of commitment in it, and allegiance, Ive now reached a point where Im mainly associated with a group of people who I suppose could be described as adamant for skepticism, or resolve for uncertainty. And this pits us against the people who are completely sure they have all the answers - or modern totalitarians. The ones who have all the information they need, and who indeed have the truth as its been revealed to them - theyre already qualified to tell us what to do. Opposition to that lot is the cause of my life, always has been, in a way, and opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, not just as a system of thought but in the mind.

[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.

Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call cultural studies.

If someone tells me that Ive hurt their feelings, I say, Im still waiting to hear what your point is.