Christopher Hitchens Quotes

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

I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people.

I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not put together like the other chaps.

Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.

For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.

I'm a single-issue voter, to get straight to the point. I'm really only interested in the candidate who's toughest and least apologetic when it comes to the confrontation with Islamic Jihadism.

The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.

Human society is inconceivable unless words are to some extent bonds.

If you say "the economy," you show you're stupid. There's no such thing as the economy. There is not a unity between the forces of production and the relations of production.

I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.

(Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.

History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.

As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only.

For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.

You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.

One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy 'legacy' is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and "torch-passing" rhetoric in general.

In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain.

I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom.

Perhaps the values of socialists can only be realized by socialists in a nonsocialist society.

I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

I don't have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I've been too lucky and that I'm over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated.

The thing about religion is that it's the first and the worst. The worst because it's the first.

It's amazing how relaxing it is not to claim you know more than you do. I'm surprised that those who claim to speak in the name of god don't take more advantage of this relief.

It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true.

I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

Most of the utopian community ideas actually are religious. They're based more on the idea of the monastery than the commune.

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.

I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

I have a strong constitution which has served me quite well, though if I hadn't had such a strong one I might have led a more healthy life perhaps.

If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn.

We become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

I think the cultural task is to separate our impulses and needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.

Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people's possessions or fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have positive consequences.

As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.

If people I've never met or don't know say that what I've written or done or said means anything to them, then I'm happy to take it at face value, for once. It cheers me up.

Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil

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.

My political life has been informed by the view that if there was any truth to religion there wouldn't really be any need for politics.

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing

Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.

I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

Jesus is Santa Claus for Adults.

I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.

The death toll is not nearly high enough... too many [jihadists] have escaped.