Christopher Hitchens Quotes

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

As I've said before, you can be an atheist and anything you like.

It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.

Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen

If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Hero­ism breaks its heart, and ide­al­ism its back, on the intran­si­gence of the cred­u­lous and the mediocre, manip­u­lated by the cyn­i­cal and the corrupt.

Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don't kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

I'm terrified of losing my voice.

As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.

Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.

Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.

There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

I'm not very impressed by people who yell "traitor" and "communist" and other less printable things. I don't like it.

I'd like to prove to other people that it's not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer.

A celebrity is well known for being well known. I'm relatively well known - but for what I've written and said, or so I fondly imagine.

Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.

The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them.

The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can't be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.

The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on ‘our side’. Is it?

What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16

th. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but...Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)

It's like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world.

Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

The belief that the world was created yesterday seems to hold great appeal to those born at that time.

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearful, partially formed animals with a terror of death and the dark

[He]said something that made it impossible to continue working for him.[The exact words were]You're fired.

Bad habits have brought me this far: why change such a tried-and-true formula?

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.

Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.

Don't write in to ask whether I would prefer Gingrich to Clinton. Ask, rather, whether Clinton prefers Gingrich to you. Go triangulate yourself.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.

Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.

The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?

There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.

In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.

The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.

[T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

Beware what you wish for, unless you have the grace to hope that your luck can be shared.

To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?

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

Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form.