If you’re looking for Christopher Hitchens quotes about politics, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people. And in this article we share a list of the 40 most interesting quotes about politics by Christopher Hitchens. Let’s get inspired!
Christopher Hitchens quotes about politics
Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.
— Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Indeed, it’s futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.
— Christopher Hitchens
Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been speakers and writers who embody Einstein’s injunction to ‘remember your humanity and forget the rest.’ It would be immodest to claim membership in this fraternity/sorority, but I hope not to have done anything to outrage it. Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are ‘fashionable, ‘ it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.
— Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky [“Letters, ” December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the “roots” of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11:Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface ‘Turning to the facts…’) and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political.
— Christopher Hitchens
What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can’t be apolitical. It will come and get you. It’s not that you shouldn’t be neutral. It’s that you won’t be able to stay neutral.
— Christopher Hitchens
What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.
— Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography
This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.
— Christopher Hitchens
It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.
— Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Selected Essays
Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.
— Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper and lower classes unless they set each other a good example. But I shouldn’t pretend that the consensus itself was any of my concern. It was absurd and slightly despicable, in the first decade of Thatcher and Reagan, to hear former and actual radicals intone piously against ‘the politics of confrontation.’ I suppose that, if this collection has a point, it is the desire of one individual to see the idea of confrontation kept alive.
— Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
If you say you’re a unifier, you expect and usually get applause. I’m a divider. Politics is division by definition, if there was no disagreement there would be no politics. The illusion of unity isn’t worth having, and is anyways unattainable.
— Christopher Hitchens
Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam) in and out of jail. I was to have this experience again, and I hope to have it many more times in the future: it sometimes allows me to feel that life is full of point.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can’t be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
You don’t say ‘they all do it’ unless you know you’ve been doing it too.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
Don’t write in to ask whether I would prefer Gingrich to Clinton. Ask, rather, whether Clinton prefers Gingrich to you. Go triangulate yourself.
— Christopher Hitchens
Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)
— Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn’t seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a ‘warrant for genocide’ forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.
— Christopher Hitchens
The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
— Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.
— Christopher Hitchens
I have been taunted on various platforms recently for becoming a neo-conservative, and have been the object of some fascinating web-site and blog stuff, from the isolationist Right as well as from the peaceniks, who both argue in a semi-literate way that neo-conservativism is Trotskyism and ‘permanent revolution’ reborn.Sometimes, you have to comb an overt anti-Semitism out of this propaganda before you can even read it straight. And I can guarantee you that none of these characters has any idea at all of what the theory of ‘permanent revolution’ originally meant.
— Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.
— Christopher Hitchens, Inequalities in Zimbabwe
One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in the White House purely as the result of a relationship with a man, and not at all a quixotic outsider who represents the aspirations of an ‘out’ group, let alone a whole sex or gender.
— Christopher Hitchens
I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that ‘issue’ I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.
— Christopher Hitchens
I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism without ignoring the political dimension. Even if I have failed in this synthesis, I have found the attempt worth making.
— Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don’t show her enough appreciation, and after all she’s done for us, she may cry.
— Christopher Hitchens
Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think ‘first woman president.’ We think—for example—’first ex-co-president’ or ‘first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent’ or ‘first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband’s perjury rap.
— Christopher Hitchens
One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred ‘experience’ on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main ‘experience’ involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation’s health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency.
— Christopher Hitchens
Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.
— Christopher Hitchens
During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous ‘New Democrat, ‘ you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word ‘Orwellian’ in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.
— Christopher Hitchens
One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no “people” waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either.
— Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
Orwell’s short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot be written by machines or committees. The truth is not always easy to discern, but a lie can and must be called by its right name. And the imagination, like certain wild animals, as Orwell himself once put it, will not breed in captivity. Actually, that last metaphor is beautiful but inaccurate. Even in the most dire conditions, there is a human will to resist coercion. We must believe that even now in North Korea, there are ideas alive inside human brains that were not put there by any authority.
— Christopher Hitchens
I’ve always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don’t really respect anyone who falls for Camelot.
— Christopher Hitchens
The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.
— Christopher Hitchens
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.
— Christopher Hitchens
But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.
— Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters
For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my ‘race, ‘ unless I was permitted to put ‘human.’ The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put ‘white, ‘ which is not even a color let alone a ‘race, ‘ and I sternly declined to put ‘Caucasian, ‘ which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King’s campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you ‘black.
— Christopher Hitchens
I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the ‘Cold War, ‘ and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors.
— Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
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