Christopher Hitchens Quotes

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

Well, I think it can be quite helpful to be working on a character who actually existed, historically. Of course, you might have material to study and help you create the character.

One decision I made in writing 'Henry and Clara' was that I would keep Lincoln's appearances and any dialogue by him to an absolute minimum, because I think readers don't quite believe it when novelists have Lincoln walking around and saying things. They just know they're in the presence of stage machinery.

Hitler was the right and logical leader for the German people, it would be a tragedy if he was overthrown.

The good historian is not for any time or any country: while he loves his fatherland, he never flatters it in anything.

At some point, I stumbled across my two main protagonists: William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered professor of history picked by Roosevelt to be America's first ambassador to Nazi Germany, and Dodd's comely and rather wild daughter, Martha, who at first was enthralled with the so-called Nazi revolution.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

It's challenging to play a real-life character because you know that it existed in the history and you have certain parameters to follow and stay within.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

I hope those who shouted "Fascist" and "Nazi" are aware that before they were born I was fighting against Fascism and Nazism.

Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all.

Fascist is not just an epithet. Fascist is a proper noun that means a specific thing. It's a real thing. It's not always referring to ancient history.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

In fact, when the fires of empire get hidden, they still stay burning underneath the moss, seething away. This is true with a lot of the countries with really difficult, impenetrable nationalist movements - countries that once had a big empire, like Turkey, England, or even in Italy, with the fascists in the middle of the last century. People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

We know that England is crying for a leader, and that leader has emerged in the person of the greatest Englishman I have ever known, Sir Oswald Mosley... When the history of Europe comes to be written I can assure you that his name will not be second to either Mussolini or Hitler.

Why make a biopic if it's not somehow helping us now? There's really no point. If it's not informing how we can do things differently now and maybe not repeat our mistakes, than why do this piece about this person or this event?

My Rama, the Rama of our prayers, is not the historical Rama, the son of Dasharatha, the king of Ayodhya.

[ J. Edgar]Hoover, I'm sure, felt that he was right in everything he did and even the things that we don't like about his character.

It could be Fascist, religious or political - it's always the same model that operates in these circumstances, and it's that which is the actuality of this film. Therefore, it's not specifically an explanation of German Fascism because that would be an impossible thing to do in any case.

The danger of course is always is caricature. The biggest challenge was to sound like Nelson Mandela. Everything else is easy to do, walk like him. He has a few ticks and things I noticed that I picked up. I didn't have any agenda, as it were, in playing the role other than to bring it as close to reality as I possibly could.

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.