Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Peter Hitchens

52 quotes

“To complain that a European Union official is a federalist, is like complaining that a bicycle has handlebars. That's what they are, that's what they do.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Question Time, BBC One (c. January 1998); "Peter Hitchens On David Cameron & The EU", TV Licence Resistance, YouTube (4 July 2014).
“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.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Smoking and buggery can both kill you, by exposing you to diseases you would not otherwise get. If homosexual acts were as common as smoking we would have to bury the victims in mass graves because AIDS slays so much faster than cancer, heart disease or emphysema.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 129 (2016 edition).
“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.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A time traveller from Fifties Britain would probably die of shock within two hours of arriving in modernised Blairland — and be quite glad to do so. The fact that the restaurants are better just would not make up for the fact that almost everything else is worse.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: So it's a crime to offend a minority but OK to offend everyone else", The Mail on Sunday (8 September 2002).
“[Asked about Richard Desmond] I do disapprove of him. How could I not? It would be ridiculous if I didn't. I met him once and to my great shame and regret I shook hands with him. Good manners, I'm afraid, prevented me from refusing to shake his hand.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview, as cited in "Look forward in anger", The Guardian (14 November 2005).
“Frankly, I could carve a better opposition party out of a banana than the Tories.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Hannah Pool, "Question Time", The Guardian (14 May 2009).
“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.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Hannah Pool, "Question Time", The Guardian (14 May 2009), about his brother Christopher Hitchens
“A liberal will defend to the death your right to agree with her. Disagree with her, and she will call the police.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The main enemy of conservatism in Britain is the Conservative Party.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the Conservative Party were your refrigerator, all your food would go bad. If it were your car or bicycle, you would be stranded by the side of the road. If it were your accountant, you would be bankrupt. If it were your lawyer, you would be in prison. If any consumer good, service or profession so consistently and predictably disappointed or failed in its ostensible main purpose, people would turn their backs on it. It would be overtaken, replaced and driven out of business by a better competitor.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fear is good for us and helps us to escape from great dangers. Those who do not feel it are in permanent peril because they cannot see the risks that lie at their feet.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Bible angers and frustrates those who believe that the pursuit of a perfect society justifies the quest for absolute power.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A new and intolerant utopianism seeks to drive the remaining traces of Christianity from Europe and North America. This time, it does so mainly in the cause of personal liberation, born in the 1960s cultural revolution, and now inflamed into special rage by any suggestion that the sexual urge should be restrained by moral limits or that it should have any necessary connection with procreation. This utopianism relies for human goodness on doctrines of human rights derived from human desires and – like all such codes – full of conflicts between the differing rights of different groups.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn't because we liked immigrants, but because we didn't like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties. Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly 'vibrant communities'. If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How I am partly to blame for Mass Immigration", The Mail on Sunday (31 March 2013).
“The struggle for [gender] equality in education and professions was won decades ago. What is really fascinating is this extraordinary alliance between radical leftist feminism and corporate multinational business which is probably the most sinister and cynical alliance since the Nazi-Soviet pact.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Q&A, ABC (c. 4 November 2013); "Q&A – From the Festival of Dangerous Ideas", abcqanda, YouTube (4 November 2013).
“Nobody under 55 knows anything much about life. Nobody under 30 knows anything.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Abolish the Lords and replace them with a House of Wisdom and Experience", The Mail on Sunday (30 August 2015).
“We cannot just give [our country] to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We won't save refugees by destroying our own country", The Mail on Sunday (6 September 2015).
“Because it calls itself the Conservative party; if it called itself the Socialist Workers' Party, I wouldn't have anything against it. It's egalitarian, it's opposed to the maintenance to the married family, which is the absolute pillar of morale and social conservatism. It's opposed to national independence, completely wedded to our membership of the supranational European Union which robs us of sovereignty. It's got much more in common with the SWP than it has with Conservatism.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Owen Jones, "Owen Jones meets Peter Hitchens", The Guardian, YouTube (14 September 2015).
“If you want to wreck the country, get some grandiose people to sit on a panel. Make sure you don’t choose anyone who disagrees with your aim. Then write a pamphlet demanding the destruction of something good, and call it a 'report'.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Goodbye Christianity, hello multicultural wasteland", The Mail on Sunday (13 December 2015).
“Donald Trump is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the death of real political conservatism: a cool, intelligent reluctance to believe that all change is good, a love for the established, the particular and the well-worn. During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism, actually a wild form of liberalism, for conservatism. They lapped up the temporary riches it provided and now find themselves yearning for leaders to take them back to a world of secure jobs and secure borders.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Goodbye Christianity, hello multicultural wasteland", The Mail on Sunday (13 December 2015).
“Don't you dare call me optimistic. (It's a) grave insult.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: @ClarkeMicah, Twitter / X (21 December 2015)
“People are terrified of changing their minds. Changing your mind is a door you don't want to open because you don’t know what’s behind it. Changing your mind means losing all your friends. Changing your mind means a complete revolution in your life. Changing your mind means publicly admitting you’ve been wrong. […] People don’t want to change their minds.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Talk with Eric Metaxas for Socrates in the City, in Oxford (c. 6 January 2016); "Peter Hitchens: The Rage Against God", Socrates in the City, YouTube (6 January 2016).
“If they win on Thursday [EU referendum, 2016], the process of abolishing Britain will be complete. If they lose, as I hope they do and still think they will, there is a faint, slender chance that we may get our country back one day.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: There's a faint chance we may get our nation back one day", The Mail on Sunday (19 June 2016).
“Since the French Revolutionaries set up the guillotine, the same thing has been true. Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed. And once changed, they will fit neatly into the Utopia that is planned for them. Utopia, as we find every so often in Russia, China and Cambodia, can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually arrive.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The transgender zealots are destroying truth itself", The Mail on Sunday (19 November 2017).
“I am ceaselessly amazed, as I look at our media, political parties, schools and universities, how formerly conservative people and institutions have adapted themselves to ideas, expressions and formulations which they once rejected and confidently mocked. Almost everything that was once derided as the work of the ‘loony left’ or ‘political correctness gone mad' is observed daily in grand, expensive private schools and is the official policy of the Conservative and Unionist party, or soon will be.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A very minor prophet", The Spectator (10 February 2018).
“[The Conservative party] is a machine for obtaining power. It would cheerfully guillotine the Queen in Trafalgar Square, if it thought that by doing so it could keep or gain office. That is why it has spent the past 20 years becoming more Blairite than New Labour.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How can anyone still think the Tory Party is Conservative after this?", The Mail on Sunday (7 October 2018).
“The Spitfire, symbol of British military heroism in the 'Good War', was always, at heart, a defensive weapon.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1934, Britain owed the US $4.4bn of World War I debt (about £866m at 1934 exchange rates). Adjusted by the Retail Price Index, a typical measure of inflation, £866m would equate to £40bn now, and if adjusted by the growth of GDP, to about £225bn.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[The] Battle of Britain did not prevent Hitler from dominating the continent for the next four years.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His [Churchill's] power over the fate of Prince of Wales was absolute and direct. He sent the ship ... into mortal peril. its combination military folly, and of boyish Churchillian posturing, is striking.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Prince of Wales and Repulse both came to be sunk by Japanese aircraft on 10 December 1941 off the coast of Malaya.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We made a hurried and shamefully disorganized exit from India, at a vast cost in Indian lives, leaving behind us two dangerous frontier conflicts that remain unresolved till today.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So sorry, Your Majesty, but I have had my first Covid vaccination for wholly selfish reasons. I did not do it for the good of others but for my own convenience. And I will have my second for the same purpose.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: I've had the Covid jab — and all it cost me was my freedom" The Mail on Sunday (27 February 2021)
“We have treated Russia with amazing stupidity. Now we pay the price for that. We had the chance to make her an ally, friend and partner. Instead we turned her into an enemy by insulting a great and proud country with greed, unearned superiority, cynicism, contempt and mistrust.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why I blame the arrogant, foolish West: Our response to this crisis in Ukraine has been to react with mistrust and abuse, and with blatant attempts to worsen the situation", The Mail on Sunday (23 February 2022).
“I have pursued a lone heresy of wondering why NATO even survived the end of its enemies, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Do we still maintain alliances against Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans? I can find no trace of them. Perhaps, overlooked in some elegant Paris street and living off ancient funds, elderly, learned men still occupy these joyous sinecures, hoping that they will not be found out.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How NATO Lost Its Way", Compact (22 March 2022).
“It is a fantasy to believe that you punish politicians by throwing them out of office. It is when they leave office that they start making the real money.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dewbs & Co, GB News (1 June 2022).
“The funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 turned out to be the burial of the British Empire. The funeral of Queen Elizabeth next week will probably be the obsequies of the United Kingdom.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Death of a Queen, Death of a Kingdom", Compact (12 September 2022).
“I'll be accused...of defending "Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor", as we must now call him, in French-Revolutionary style, as I think Marie Antoinette ended up being called "The Widow Capet" in the same fashion.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview on Times Radio (1 November 2025). Same idea echoed by Mary Kenny, "Has Andrew brought the British royal family to its Marie-Antoinette moment?", Irish Independent (8 November 2025).
“There is a strong moral case for strict border controls and severe limits on immigration. A country is the only unit in which it is possible for people to be effectively unselfish to their neighbours. Without its shared culture and loyalty, there can be no shared law, no shared willingness to pay taxes or accept authority, no free nation capable of protecting its own people from danger within and without, and of sheltering those fleeing from oppression elsewhere. This argument often goes unsaid because of the semi-official ideological censorship now operating in most Western countries, which is called political correctness and which smears all dissenting views, usually as 'racist'. It is important that those genuinely concerned with freedom and with the defence of civilisation armour themselves against this foolish attempt to suppress free debate, and perhaps reconsider positions taken more because they are modish than because they are defensible with truth and reason.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The End of Britain", Index on Censorship, no. 2 (2003).
“It cannot be long before Britain has its first 24-year-old granny. When you abolish husbands and fathers, that is what you get. As the rules of civilised life are swept away and the only people interested in getting married are lesbian clergywomen, there will soon be thousands of them. And for every youthful grandmother, there will be at least one feral, abandoned male, stalking the streets. Britain's neglected poor, who once brought up their children in family homes with rules, are becoming a primitive tribe, stripped of the laws of civilisation and sinking into barbarism. The same barbarism, by the way, is mirrored among the loud and loutish rich.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What next in Britain's baby factory? A granny of 24?", The Mail on Sunday (29 May 2005).
“The accelerating decline of civility in Britain, which struck me very hard when I returned there in 1995 after nearly ﬁve years in Russia and the USA, has several causes. The rapid vanishing of Christianity from public consciousness and life, as the last fully Christian generation ages and disappears, seems to me to be a major part of it. I do not think I would have been half so shocked by the squalor and rudeness of 1990 Moscow, if I had not come from a country where Christian forbearance was still well-established. If I had then been able to see the London of 2010, I would have been equally shocked.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I scoffed. Another religious painting. Couldn't these people think of anything else to depict? Still scoffing, I peered at the naked figures fleeing toward the pit of hell, out of my usual faintly morbid interest in the alleged terrors of damnation. But this time I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open. These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation. Because they were naked, they were not imprisoned in their own age by time-bound fashions. On the contrary, their hair and, in an odd way, the set of their faces were entirely in the style of my own time. They were me and the people I knew. One of them — and I have always wondered how the painter thought of it — is actually vomiting with shock and fear at the sound of the Last Trump.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The current intellectual assault on God in Europe and North America is in fact a specific attack on Christianity – the faith that stubbornly persists in the morality, laws, and government of the major Western countries. Despite the self-conscious militancy of some of the anti-theists against Islam, they rarely encounter organized Islam in their own countries, and are sensibly wary of challenging Islam on its own ground, and seldom debate with Muslim spokesmen (who are not interested in discussing an issue they believe to be closed). Their hostility to Islam as a ‘threat to our way of life’ is a result of their late realization that it might, if it became powerful, menace the license in sexual and other matters that their cause has won, thanks to the weakness of Christianity in its former domains.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us examine the strange problem of the Atheist states, which a ruthlessly honest Godless person must surely admit as a difﬁculty. After all, intelligent Christians must – if they are candid – accept that faith has often led to cruel violence and intolerant persecution. They may say, as I would, that this was because humans often misunderstand or misuse the teachings of the religions they follow. This is not because they are religious, but because Man is not great. Atheists, in return, ought equally to concede that Godless regimes and movements have given birth to terrible persecutions and massacres. They do not do so, in my view, because in these cases the slaughter is not the result of a misunderstanding, or of excessive zeal.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Atheists cannot bear to look their faith’s faults full in the face. They cannot even admit that their dogmatic insistence that there is no God is in fact a faith, though they cannot possibly know if they are right. Their belief, apparently, is not even a belief. And so the escape clauses come thick and fast. If atheism in practice appears at any point to have bad consequences, that is because it took on the character of religion. So this murder, that massacre, that purge just do not count. If religious people do good things with good consequences, that is because they are really atheists without knowing it.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My gorge rises at the use of the word 'white.' The issue should never be the colour of somebody's skin. I thought we all very, very long ago accepted that what mattered about somebody was not the colour of his skin but the content of his character. And I'm not interested in what colour they are. The real question is, does a country which has a very large amount of immigration adapt to the immigrants, or do the immigrants who arrived in that country adapt to that country. And it's my very strong view that the only hope of a tranquil and peaceful and productive and successful society is that the migrants adapt to the place to which they come. And for very many years we have not been encouraging or indeed helping them to do that. We've been encouraging, through a policy of official state multiculturalism, that people should stay separate, and should remain within their migrant communities and we have not created a single British nationality. There are various feeble efforts to make them take exams in how to claim social security benefits, or who was Winston Churchill. That is not the same. We have ceased to be proud of our own country, culture, history, religion, language, and we haven't asked our new citizens to be proud of them either. And we now see the result of that. It's not a question whether they're white. It's a question whether they're British. And my fear is they're not becoming British and the Britain is ceasing to be Britain, and that is a very great shame both for us who were already here, and for those who have come.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Question Time, BBC One (21 February 2013).
“Let me repeat that the absurd thing about the anti-Islam neo-conservatives is that they are invariably supporters of unrestricted migration, the means by which Islam has quite peacefully established itself as a permanent, growing major social, religious and political force in our country. If Sharia law comes to Britain, as Mr Jacubs fears, it will not be because of violent actions such as the Woolwich outrage, which I think we can safely assume were condemned and disowned by most British Muslims. It will be as the result of the entirely peaceful establishment of a sizeable Muslim population in this country.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Another attempt at reasoning with Mr Jacubs and the neo-cons", The Mail on Sunday (28 December 2013).