Top 90 Christopher Hitchens Quotes

I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second.

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

It’s not at all good when your cancer is ‘palpable’ from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.

I’m crepuscular.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.

It’s surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

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

Obscenity comes from grime.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‘in denial’ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

It doesn’t take much to make me angry.

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

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

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

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.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

There’s been some research in cognitive science, I’m told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it’s white noise.

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

There’s a big difference, as I’m sure you know, it’s a slightly manneristic one, between people of the ’60s and people of ’68. Being a soixante-huitard – it’s so nice to have a French word for it – is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the ’60s.

I like surprises.

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

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

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

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

A gentleman is never rude except on purpose – I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.

To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’

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.

Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.

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

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 wanted to write.

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

Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.

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

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.

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

The citizens of Tumortown are forever assailed with cures and rumors of cures.

I’ve proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.

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

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

I’m not a conservative of any kind.

Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

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.

A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it’s employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

Well, I’ll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

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

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

Well, we can’t say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‘I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,’ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

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

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

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

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

My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There’s no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I’m in a small way quite proud of some of it – I only wish I’d done more.

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.’

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

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

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

The term ‘the American Left’ is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn’t really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime. I’ve came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.