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Peter Hitchens
52 quotes
“It was in the communist world that today’s socioeconomic hell — the hideous love-child of Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher — was pioneered. The Soviets had the compulsory two-earner household, with its children condemned to government nurture and raised to love the Party above their parents. They had its weak parents and state-dependent adults, and its incessant divorce, all leading to an eviscerated and futile caricature of marriage, to the point where marriage was drained of all meaning and power. They just did not have the post-1990 combination that almost nobody saw coming: the endless electronic consumerism, through which we may try to buy back our lost happiness and freedom in the form of pleasure and drugged stupor. If they had managed that, the U.S.S.R. would still be there, as Mao’s China is. Marxism really is not the enemy of consumerism. When it realized it needed to care more about the mind and morality than about money, it rejuvenated itself and made the future its own again. That was what the 1960s were really about. Capitalism, understanding this, has made its peace with the revolution. Having grasped that it can flourish in the absence of freedom and Christianity, it also now understands that it has no need or wish to keep its proletarians poor. On the contrary, they need to be affluent or indebted enough to purchase its products.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Partially Reformed", The Lamp (3 June 2021).
“Evil news from Prague, in another stuffy August long ago, turned my world over completely. This was 1968, a year of wonders, none of them very nice, which will not easily leave my recollection. It was the year I joined a Trotskyist sect. It was the year I punched a man (in self defence). It was the year I attended my first violent raucous demonstration, against the war in Vietnam, with the police horses thundering through the March mud in Grosvenor Square. A few weeks later Paris was full of tear gas and flying cobblestones, and how I wished I was there. It was an age when, if your head was not hot, you weren't thinking or fully alive. I was on the wrong side – and I was on the right side. I will never be able to unscramble the messy omelette of opinions I then held, to separate the good from the bad.”
Peter Hitchens (born 1951) first seen 2026 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How Prague cured me of my communism", The Spectator {29 August 2026).