4 Christopher Hitchens Quotes on Rhetoric

Christopher Hitchens quotes on rhetoric

15. They ('Islamo-fascists') gave us no peace and we shouldn't give them any. We can't live on the same planet as them and I'm glad because I don't want to. I don't want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murderers and rapists and torturers and child abusers. It's them or me. I'm very happy about this because I know it will be them. It's a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it's also a pleasure. I don't regard it as a grim task at all.

25. It is rather a pity, considered from the standpoint of the professional politician or opinion-taker, that nobody knows exactly what 'credibility' is, or how one acquires it. 'Credibility' doesn't stand for anything morally straightforward, like meaning what you say or saying what you mean. Nor does it signify anything remotely quantifiable - any correlation between evidence presented and case made. Suggestively, perhaps, it entered the language as a consensus euphemism during the Vietnam War, when 'concerned' members of the Eastern Establishment spoke of a 'credibility gap' rather than give awful utterance to the thought that the Johnson administration was systematically lying. To restore its 'credibility,' that administration was urged - not to stop lying, but to improve its public presentation. At some stage in the lesson learned from that injunction, the era of postmodern politics began. It doesn't seem ridiculous now to have 'approval ratings' that fluctuate from week to week, because these are based upon the all-important 'perception' factor, which has in turn quite lost its own relationship to the word 'perceptive.'

86. (Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.

98. A couple of months after the invasion of Iraq, I was in Los Angeles and some drunk accosted me, saying, 'George Bush was right about everything he said about Iraq!' - weapons of mass destruction, the al-Qaeda connection and more. It was Christopher Hitchens, 'debating' me, and furious. His confusing our President's assertions with reality was a verbal pie he threw in the air and caught on his face.