Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchenswas an English-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 April 1949
CountryUnited States of America
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.
Suddenly that it was as dangerous to be in America as it was to be overseas. So that the false distinction that's made by the anti-war movement between being over there and over here was exposed for all to see as an illusion. Although a number of people, a large amount of people still share in it. In other words, when I've been in Iraq or Afghanistan, I've probably been safer because I can carry a weapon if I have to, than my wife and daughter are living in Washington.
I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.
Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.
Victor invented me, in a way. He gave me a desk and a sponsor and a place to hang my hat, which was what I needed.
I would rather be held in contempt than support such a scandalous outcome. I won't testify if it's just against (Blumenthal), ... The point is (that) the president made sure, some way or another, that the story got into print. It was a threat against a potential witness -- a very vulgar and crude one, very typical of his modus operandi.
I worked out early on to give up things I couldn't do well at all.
I don't expect anyone to come and contradict me.
I don't consider myself to be that credulous.
Sheehan has obviously taken a short course in the Michael Moore/Ramsey Clark school of Iraq analysis and has not succeeded in making it one atom more elegant or persuasive.
Mr. Blumenthal stated that Monica Lewinsky had been a 'stalker' and that the president was 'the victim' of a predatory and unstable sexually demanding young woman, ... Referring to Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Blumenthal used the word 'stalker' several times.
When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.
We had to do this because our governments would not make the elemental statement that we stand with Denmark against this atrocious campaign of lies and hatred and violence.
To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental.