5 Christopher Hitchens Quotes on Ideology

Christopher Hitchens quotes on ideology

27. It was an axiom of 'containment' that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. 'Neutralism' was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological - and sometimes military - pressure to fall into line.

35. There is a reason for the affected profession of 'anarchist sympathies' among Tories and grandees, and of 'libertarian principles' by Hobbesian yahoos of the right. Among the former, one sees the upholding of the view that a gentleman's business and property are his own, and none of the government's. Among the latter, a distaste for democracy, for taxation, and for the need to consult others about the planet.

36. Rushdie had written a book of nonfiction which offered critical but decided support to the Nicaraguan revolution. He had also been eloquent about the rights of the ever-relegated Palestinians. What more natural, when he was threatened with assassination by contract, than to jubilate about a terrorist-symp who had been caught in his own logic? I counted some ten newspaper and magazine columns from the Podhoretz school, all making this same point in the same words - demonstrating the impressive Zhdanovite discipline that is the special mark of the faction. All of them seemed to regard the affair as some sort of heavenly revenge for the sin of radical promiscuity; much as they have represented the AIDS crisis as a vengeance as on sixties morality. The ethical nullity of these positions never got beyond mere gloating, and will one day help to illustrate the essential distinction between irony and brutish sarcasm.

37. Perhaps the values of socialists can only be realized by socialists in a nonsocialist society.

94. Hitchens maintains that that 'there is a close fit between the democratically minded and the pro-American' in the Middle East - like 'President for Life' Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan...that [referring to 9/11] 'Washington finally grasped that 'there were `root causes behind the murder-attacks' [emphasis in original] (but didn't Hitchens ridicule any allusion to 'root causes' as totalitarian apologetics?)...that 'racism' is 'anti-American as nearly as possible by definition'...that 'evil' can be defined as 'the surplus value of the psychopath'...is there a Bartlett's for worst quotations?