Christopher Hitchens Quotes

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.

The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.

I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.

Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.

Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.

One can't indefinitely do for somebody what he is reluctant to do for himself.

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

The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

It's considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don't see why that's considered a normal thing.

That most risky and volatile of all things a self-pitying majority.

If the Qur'an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.

A good liar must have a good memory.

If you can charm everyone it means you don't care about anyone in particular.

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

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?

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

Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.

What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.

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.

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.

I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.

You can't have occupation and human rights.

Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.

Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.

All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.

For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.

Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled.

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

A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.

It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries .

A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.

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

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.