Best 19 quotes of Peter Hitchens on MyQuotes

Peter Hitchens

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    Peter Hitchens

    Abortion is the only event that modern liberals think too violent and obscene to portray on TV. This is not because they are squeamish or prudish. It is because if people knew what Abortion really looked like, it would destroy their pretence that it is a civilized answer to the problem of what to do about unwanted babies.

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    Peter Hitchens

    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.

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    Peter Hitchens

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

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    Peter Hitchens

    Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening. And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.

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    Peter Hitchens

    Conventional Wisdom's biggest single mistake is its thought-free, obsolete idea of Left and Right. This still relies on categories and symbols which were dead long ago, and only kept from decomposing by the refrigeration of the Cold War: capital versus labour, state control versus free enterprise, NATO versus the Warsaw Pact, 'Democracy versus Communism', the stuffy censoring establishment versus the vibrant, unconventional fringe. These deserted battlefields have little to do with the real divisions which now exist between idealist, optimistic 'progressives' and anti-utopian, pessimistic conservatives.

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    Peter Hitchens

    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.

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    Peter Hitchens

    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.

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    Peter Hitchens

    I believe people often understand far more about their opponents' ideas than they appear to, and know that what appear to be a few easy steps along a pleasant road of mild revision can end in a political and moral journey of thousands of miles. This is why they never take the first step, and why they fend off articulate criticism with anger, ostracism and abuse rather than with reason. This is why I abandoned the idea of writing a book entitled 'How to Change your Mind". It became clear to me that most people hate the very idea of changing their minds, while claiming to be open-minded. In the same way, most people hate freedom of speech, except for those who completely agree with them. But they pretend otherwise.

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    Peter Hitchens

    Idealism and dogma are easier to sustain in a modern university campus than anywhere else on earth. There, you are free from the influences of home, subsidised into a fake independence which you think you have earned, spared the need to earn your bread, spared contact with the true drama of provincial life, and surrounded by arrogant and self-righteous people in their late teens, much like yourself - who think that they have discovered sex and idealism for the first time in the history of the human race.

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    Peter Hitchens

    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.

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    Peter Hitchens

    State ownership of industry is no longer politically important or particularly contentious. Regulation by unaccountable national bodies, and even by more unaccountable supranational and global authorities, has quietly taken its place, with implication that few have yet grasped.

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    Peter Hitchens

    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.

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    Peter Hitchens

    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.

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    Peter Hitchens

    The centre of politics is simply where those who are currently in office and in power, in politics and in the media, want it to be.

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    Peter Hitchens

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

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    Peter Hitchens

    The Left finds itself up to its knees in these paradoxes because - deprived of its old aims by the end of the Cold War and the end of heavy industry - it needs new masses to serve as a replacement proletariat. It too readily and thoughtlessly accepted Muslims as convenient substitutes for the white working class which has now ceased to support it, or vanished altogether. It has also fallen under the influence of revolutionaries far more subtle and effective than the Russian Bolsheviks and Trotskyist rump. The gaping space left by the death of classical political revolutionary socialism has been filled by the spirit of 1968. That spirit will accept almost any ally against social and cultural conservatism, and against the Christianity that lies beneath those forces. This is why the sexual revolution has become so inseparably linked to the cultural and political revolutions. The 1968 ideology is not merely a ready-made and self-righteous political system, with clear position on every major controversy. It is a limitless process of personal liberation from conscience, guilt and restraint, dressed in the flashy robes of moral superiority. These features are happily combined - in this particular generation - with personal ambition and worldly wealth. In all the most well-regarded and rewarded trades and professions, especially broadcasting, the law and the arts, a full set of 1968 opinions is an asset and an aid to social advancement. Rejection of these opinions is a grave disadvantage.

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    Peter Hitchens

    [The] supposedly impartial interpretation of the news has become one of the most powerful tools of modern propaganda.

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    Peter Hitchens

    Unlike many conservatives, I do not view Leftism as dishonourable or deliberately evil. On the contrary, I respect its impulses and wish they led where they seek to go. I reject them because they lead somewhere entirely different, and rather unpleasant.

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    Peter Hitchens

    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.