Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.

In modern Greek history, there is a close relationship between national humiliation and political radicalization.

There are things about quitting the smoking habit for which nobody prepares you. Did I have any idea that I would indulge in long, drooling-nay, dribbling-lascivious dreams in which I was still wreathed in fragrant blue fumes? I would wake with the complete and guilty conviction that I had sinned in word and deed while I was asleep.

I would say that if you don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you're really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

When you consider how many millions of workdays begin with hangovers great and small, it is mildly ­surprising to find how few real descriptions of the experience our literature can boast.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.

No moral person would do such a thing unless they thought it was divinely warranted.

There are two clocks ticking in Iran. One is the democracy movement clock which is ticking now faster than it was but it's got a lot of catching up to do. And then there's the clock that's ticking towards a nuclear weaponry.

What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

A Great voice has fallen silent. A great heart has stopped.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'.

Exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn't so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside the baggy garments.

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation - is that good for the world?

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Totalitarian is a cliché, dictatorship is based on clichéd thinking, on very tried and tested uniform stuff. They don't mind that they're boring, they don't mind that they're obvious, their point is made.

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest"; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.)

In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

I don't regard myself as any kind of conservative, except conceivably neo, and that word, of course, is a ridiculous appellation, because it's used to describe a group that was ready to make war on the status quo, which is not a conservative position.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

How do I know that I know this, except that I've always been taught this and never heard anything else? [...] How sure am I of my own views? Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay, because you're in the safely moral majority.

In one way, traveling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.

Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.

What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.

It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.)

If we have free will, by definition we cannot be granted it. We can't be given it. My [-audio-recording-distorted-] paradox states that 'Of course we have free will, we have no choice.' To say that it's a gift is to negate the whole concept of free will on its face. So, if that isn't self-evident, I can't think of anything that would meet the definition of being self-evident.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

"Objective" means that, in a confrontation with the evidence, you would be willing to change your own mind.

Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.