Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivorsthe livingcould attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrsthose who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the facthad been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. your life?
boyhood causes childhood christian-martyrs christianity comrades conscription death fanaticism friends kamikaze martyrdom martyrs masochism memorials november orwell patriotism poppies principles religion sacrifice self-abnegation self-importance soldiers suicide suicide-attack theocracy torture ugliness war

About This Quote

About Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was a 20th-century American and american author and journalist. 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. Read more on Wikipedia →

Themes

  • Death — Contemplations on mortality, loss, and the legacy we leave
  • Religion — Exploring belief systems, worship, and spiritual practice
  • War — Reflections on conflict, peace, and the human cost of war

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

“What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.”
— Christopher Hitchens
happiness vindication

“Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being "not even wrong." Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.”
— Christopher Hitchens
falsifiability new-ge religion science

“What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.”
— Christopher Hitchens
death friends friendship life

“About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is ...”
— Christopher Hitchens
afterlife atheism debate ethics

“It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and ...”
— Christopher Hitchens
children crime fear graveyards

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”
— Christopher Hitchens
mortality pain
View all quotes by Christopher Hitchens →

Related Quotes

“I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.”
— Donald Miller
boyhood fatherhood fear love

“Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous s...”
— R.M. Ballantyne
boyhood child-training courage

“I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and -lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jims got the hair on his head, the ...”
— Ray Bradbury
boyhood richness wealth

“I believe that Gandhis views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-p...”
— Albert Einstein
causes corporations gandhi truth

“The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like t...”
— John Piper
causes christ christianity god

“Happy is the man who has learned the causes of things.”
— Virgil, The Georgics
causes happiness knowledge

“In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. ...”
— Marjorie Spock
childhood children learning school

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
childhood laughter love oblivious

“When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been eng...”
— Craig Davidson, Cataract City
childhood dad kids work