Christopher Hitchens on Hate Speech

Christopher Hitchens in a debate at Hart House at the University of Toronto, November 15th, 2006. The motion being considered, with Hitchens arguing in the affirmative, was: "Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate." He covers the gamut from Holocaust Denial to Religion in this speech, which I consider his most brilliant piece of rhetoric to date.

• Category

  Education

[Keef West]

You can listen to one clip of Christopher Hitchens over a thousand times and learn something new every time. So glad he lived in the time of video and audio recordings, he will be remembered as one of the first pioneers of reason in the recording age.

[kynismos]

Highly enjoyable, irreplaceable, terribly missed.

[chinopisces]

You're an idiot.

[David Miller]

Love requires almost no intelligence. 

[andreiandrei1]

Religious ideas should be treated with hatred and ridicule, not religious people.

[ascetic43]

Hitchens IS "hate speech". Sorry, "was"....

[AustralianBigot]

Hate doesn't come from fear, that's an absolute load of shit, if someone steals from me I hate them if someone hurts someone I car about I hate them if someone abuses me i hate them, if someone mass immigrates into my country and demands I reduce my freedom to satisfy their religion I hate them, fear isn't hate.

[Solunac Balkan]

Hate comes from fear and is natural emotion. Love, on the other hand, is state of mind and need intelligence and effort.

[AppleMaster1]

The joke is that Austria managed to have the world identify hitler not as autrian but as german, and have them identify beethoven as Viennese, both of which are opposittes

[AppleMaster1]

stay cool.

[Chris Bauer]

No, you can't take believers seriously, because by doing so, you automatically vindicate their beliefs. Theism is such a destructive thing because it assumes that the strange and silly and conspicuously selective opinions of certain human beings are to be taken so seriously as to be literally infallible. This is absurd and worthy of ridicule, and a crucial part of the solution to this problem is to expose that. Hitchens couldn't have conducted himself more appropriately.