Peter Hitchens Quotes

The problem of utopia is that it can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never arrive.

We welcome into our homes the machines that vacuum the thoughts out of our heads and pump in someone else's. John Berger in Ways of Seeing said that television advertisers succeeded by persuading viewers to envy themselves as they would be if they bought the product. These programmes do something similar, by persuading the viewer to envy himself as he would be if his life were that little bit more exciting and melodramatic than it actually is. They can make things seem normal that are not.

The conservative society accepts that rebellion and bad behaviour are natural and must be curbed. The liberal society requires all its citizens to be perfectly balanced, conforming to its ideals and aims with a happy heart and a willing mind - a

We must decide whether to act as if the universe is a cosmic car-crash, in which our actions have no significance beyond their observable effects, or an ordered and purposeful whole, in which our actions continue to echo and reverberate down all eternity.

The freer a society is, the more it leaves the family alone.

A liberal will defend to the death your right to agree with her. Disagree with her, and she will call the police.

The Bolsheviks killed their own most loyal supporters at Kronstadt in 1921, because they failed to understand that the revolution no longer required revolutionaries, but obedient servants.

This society, promoted by its leaders as an egalitarian utopia, was in truth one of the most unequal societies on earth.

I concede to my atheist opponents that belief or unbelief is a choice. As a choice, it is based upon desire. I desire, and therefore choose to believe in, one kind of universe, one that has laws and purpose with justice woven into its very fabric. The unbeliever desires, and therefore chooses to believe in, a chaotic universe where the dead remain dead and actions have no effect beyond their immediately observable consequences.

I think it is important for our society to wonder why it has lately become so ready to accept that human woe can be cured or soothed by chemicals. These chemicals do not alter or reform the ills of our civilisation. They adapt the human being to them.

Evolution is an unproven theory. If what its fundamentalist supporters believe is true, fishes decided to grow lungs and legs and walk up the beach. The idea is so comically daft that only one thing explains its survival-that lonely, frightened people wanted to expel God from the Universe because they found the idea that He exists profoundly uncomfortable.

Globalisation is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become – is visibly becoming – a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.

It did not then cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief. It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it. Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue.

Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

In my early teens, [my grandfather] would sometimes stomp around his living room, where he used to shave towards mid-day with bowl, brush and open razor, deriding my ignorance and mocking the made-up discipline of sociology, which I at one stage claimed to be studying. 'What is sociology?' he roared derisively, twisting and rolling the silly word on his Hampshire tongue. I knew, alas, that he was quite right.

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.

I happen to think Israel is in many ways a noble enterprise, worth defending and supporting, and that Israel's fashionable enemies in the West have allied themselves with some of the nastiest and most bigoted forces now loose in the world.

The balance of power between the sexes had been destabilized, and relations between mothers and their children transformed from a natural and accepted one to a mere option.

Far too many people - many of them academics, many politicians - continue to jabber about a supposed 'special relationship' between our two countries.
I used to think that no such thing existed. Recently, I have become convinced that it does, and that it is in fact a Specially Bad Relationship.