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The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

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Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was an English-American author, journalist, and social critic. He was known for his sharp wit and controversial views, particularly on religion and politics. Hitchens was a prominent figure in the public discourse of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. more

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“Machiavelli’s teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. But it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much alike. Charles V. offered 5000 crowns for the murder of an enemy. Ferdinand I. and Ferdinand II., Henry III. and Louis XIII., each caused his most powerful subject to be treacherously despatched. Elizabeth and Mary Stuart tried to do the same to each other. The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism.”

PoliticsMachiavelliRealpolitikMachiavellianism
Book:The History of Freedom and Other Essays
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“Ferdinando [King of Naples] resolv’d, in good Earnest, to try how to compromise the Affair of the Castles; being persuaded, that that when this Obstacle was remov'd, Matters would easily return into the fame peaceable Channel. But by removing the Causes, the Effects that sprung from them are not always remov'd. For, as it frequently happens, that Resolutions taken out of Fear seldom appear sufficient to the Fearful.”

FearRivalryRealpolitik
Book:The History of Italy
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“The art academies had offered a story of art as the conquest, loss, and finally reconquest of nature through the mastery of illusionistic technology, improved by a grasp of ideal beauty. Romanticism replaced this with the story of art as an acquisition and then loss of wisdom, warning us not to mistake naturalism or technical skill for such wisdom. Historicism proposed that each period expresses its view of the world through its own forms; no art form can be preferred for they are all true registrations of the evolving mind. Materialism, finally, a version of historicism, told the story of art as a series of local responses to conditions, materials, tools, and functions. The immediate purpose of Riegl's teleology was to counter the crass reductionism of the materialist version. He did this by insinuating that there was something animating the history of form, a ghost in the machine, a will to form that overrode pragmatic needs. There is a tension in Riegl's art history between the anthropomorphic concept of Kunstwollen, which locates the motor of history in the individual, and the teleological shape of history, the inexorable dematerialization and intellectualization of art, a schema inherited from Hegel and never justified philosophically by Riegl. For Riegl, all art is naturalistic; it is simply that each epoch sees nature differently. What they see is the true object of art. This transforms art history into a history of seeing, and therefore of thinking.”

MaterialismRomanticismHistoricismRiegl
Book:A History of Art History
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