Christopher Hitchens Quotes

There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.

[Even if the U.S. doesn't attack] Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion.

The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.

The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.

Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed 'we' did. Well, does that not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power?

Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power.

I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.

If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.

I don't want them (religious followers) trying to inflict their belief on me.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka .

It's normally agreed that the question 'How are you?' doesn't put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer.

Will an Iraq war make our Al Qaeda problem worse? Not likely.

The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.

I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

Exceptional claims, require exceptional evidence.

I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?

I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.

Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

I vote and I do jury duty.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: "anima"-the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?

With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.

The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.

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

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.

Of course, I do everything for money.

There is no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot instantly be improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’.

Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.

Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

A bit of a stomach give a chap a position in society.

If you think all this is going on, all these gigantic fields of gravity and light with you in mind, then you really do have a self-centredness problem.

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

No child's behind left.

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

Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.