Peter Hitchens
From Wikiquote
Peter Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is an award-winning British columnist and author, noted for his traditionalist conservative stance.
Contents |
Quotes [edit]
- Frankly, I could carve a better opposition party out of a banana than the Tories.
- "Question Time", The Guardian, 14 May 2009
From 'The Abolition of Britain' (1999) [edit]
- In 1965, the people of Britain may have been poorer, smaller, shabbier, dirtier, colder, narrower, more set in their ways, ignorant of olive oil, polenta and - even - lager. But they knew what united them, they shared a complicated web of beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, loyalties and dislikes. (p.23)
- A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation. (p.35)
- In an incredibly short time, we have been turned into a nation without heroes, without pride in our past or knowledge of either our past triumphs or our past follies and disasters. We are like an amnesia patient, waking up in the hospital ward, with both past and future great blank spaces stretching behind and before us, doomed to repeat mistakes we do not even know we have already made. (p. 62-63)
- To anyone brought up when English literature, scripture, liturgy, poetry and hymns were still taught and learned, it is astonishing to find out how little they have in common with those who were raised and educated in the post-revolutionary culture. The pre-revolutionary survivor can finish other people's sentences, detect the rhythm in other people's speeches, recognise a score of allusions in a page of print. There is hardly a word or phrase which does not awake a richer thought, or an echo of something hauntingly similar. (p.196)
On Christopher Hitchens [edit]
- We're not close. We're different people, we have different lives, we have entirely different pleasures, we live in different continents. If we weren't brothers we wouldn't know each other.
- "Question Time", The Guardian, 14 May 2009
