6 Christopher Hitchens Quotes on Truth

Christopher Hitchens quotes on truth

7. A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.

10. What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

56. It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true.

66. I'm quite convinced in my own mind that those who were arguing that [the need to intervene in Iraq] was a more immediate one than some believed - were I'm sure convinced that they were right on fact, I don't think they were making it up. So as to lying, I don't think it has been established that any lies were told.

72. On Jerry Falwell: I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to. The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup. The whole consideration of this horrible little person is offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality and who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men, that we're not told that people who believe like Falwell will be snatched up into heaven - I'm glad to see he skipped the rapture and was found on the floor of his office - while the rest of us go to hell. How dare they talk to children like this, how dare they raise money from credulous people on their huckster-like Elmer Gantry radio stations and fly around in private jets as he did, giggling and snickering all the time at what he was getting away with?:How dare he say, for example, that the Antichrist is already present amongst us and is an adult male Jew, while all the time fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping anti-Semitic innuendos into American politics along with his friends Robertson and Graham, encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of as holy land to the people who already lived there, undercutting and ruining every democrat and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God? He's done us an enormous, enormous disservice by this sort of demagoguery:the fact is that the country suffers to a considerable extent from paying too much by way of compliment to anyone who can describe themselves as a person of faith - Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard: Chaucerian frauds, people who are simply pickpockets and frauds who prey on the gullible:He woke up every morning, as I say, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking 'I've got away with it again!':I think he was a conscious charlatan and bully and fraud and I think if he read the Bible at all - and I would doubt whether he could actually read any long book at all - that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way. I'm gonna repeat what I said before about the Israeli question. It's very important. Jerry Falwell kept saying to his own crowd 'Yeah you gotta like the Jews cos they can make more money in ten minutes than you can make in a lifetime.' He was also full, as his friends Robertson and Graham are and were, of anti-Semitic innuendo, yet, in the most base and hypocritical way, he encouraged the worst elements among Jewry. He got Menachim Begin to give him the Jabotinsky Medal, celebrating an alliance between Christian fundamentalism and Jewish fanaticism that has ruined the chances for peace in the Middle East. Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man.

82. Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomsky's effort to 'minimize' or 'deny' the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony 'credibility' of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize 'the other side'; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making. 1985