"In their last ditch, the royalists object that this all too bloodless and practical; that people need and want the element of magic and fantasy. Nobody wants life to be charmless. But the element of fantasy and magic is as primitive as it is authentic, and there are good reasons why it should not come from the state. When orchestrated and distributed in that way, it leads to disappointment and rancour, and can lead to the enthronement of sillier or nastier idols."
Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British and American author and journalist. Known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence", is used in philosophy and law.
"We know that there are people for whom the country and a certain rather mediocre dynasty are in effect unimaginable without one another. There is no need to doubt or mock the sincerity of the conviction. However, there is no reason in our history or our literature to endorse or underwrite it either. We possess an alternative tradition which is capable of outlasting this royal house as it has already outlasted others."
"The first False Issue one normally encounters is the claim that it has no real power. One never quite knows what real is intended to mean here, but the conventions of the False Issue lead one to guess that the word is doing duty for formal. Thus is the red herring introduced. A moment later, the same speaker is telling another listener of all the good things that monarchy is a force for. These good things invariably turn out to be connected to power. They are things like stability, unity, national cohesion, continuity and other things for which powerless people would find it difficult to be a force. Edmund Wilson would have had little trouble noticing, furthermore, that all the above good things are keywords for conservative and establishment values."
"Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomskys effort to "minimize" or "deny" the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony "credibility" of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize "the other side"; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making."
"In todays Britain, the idea that there could be a Constitution more powerful - and even sacrosanct - than any crowned head or elected politician (thus abolishing the false antithesis between hereditary monarchs and capricious presidents) is thought of as a breathtakingly new and daring idea."
"We find that the presidency has become too secretive, too powerful, too trammelled, too ceremonial, too impotent or too complicated, depending on the president under discussion or the critic making the analysis. On one thing all are agreed - there is a danger of an imperial or monarchical presidency. An incumbent in Washington knows he is in trouble on the day that cartoonists begin to represent him as a king."
"...in fact, the war against Iraq is continuing. And its continuing now by the means which the administration described as contemptible and useless, when they were put forth as an alternative to an actual all-out aerial bombardment. Namely, economic sanctions, which do have the effect of slowly starving and crippling the population of Iraq, while leaving the military caste of Saddam Hussein and his criminal Baath Party in charge. I was asked the other day … why do you think the administration decided to spare Saddam Hussein … and I said I think because they thought they might need him again..."