Christopher Hitchens Quotes

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so e...

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in rememb...

[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre c...

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had id...

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliab...

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and capric...

Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us w...

[T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. On...

A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember ...

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to w...

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front f...

In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian pligh...

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

I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in p...

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He h...

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so e...

It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and...

During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Sus...

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.

It was at a conference in Cyprus in 1976, where the theme was the rights of small nations, that I fi...

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn'...

[Nicholson] Baker can't seem to get enough of the wisdom of Gandhi and cites at length an open lette...

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful...

Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-a...

Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an u...

We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them ...

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate...

The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatan...

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Reli...

Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to gi...

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship wi...

The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials ...

You can walk around this culture now, as a proud supporter of the so called anti-war movement and it...

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between p...

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

Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and al...

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This i...

You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophe...

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US ...

For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the f...

I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words ...

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been ...

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic ...

It's not always a question of you changing your mind. I think very often your mind changes you. You ...

We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionarie...

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous,...

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another...

Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I w...

Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooki...

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any...

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a b...

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

In his entire output, I can find only one piece of genuine unfairness: a thuggish attack on the poet...

The lawbreaking itch is not always an anarchic one. In the first place, the human personality has (o...

There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture'...

'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberal...

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

When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.

The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influ...

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the gro...

To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off

I think that people's sexual preferences are a legitimate subject for humour, dirty humour if at all...

In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which ...

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 att...

As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phr...

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested...

Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a...

Actually, the “leap of faith”—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—...

How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is th...

And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles a...

Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistake...

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to re...

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decim...

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for s...

God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the p...

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and re...

Almost all religions from Buddhism to Islam feature either a humble prophet or a prince who comes to...

[T]o believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reje...

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact...

Yet in our hands and within our view is a whole universe of discovery and clarification, which is a ...

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

We may differ on many things, but what we respect is freeinquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of...

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous mer...

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, a...

But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views...

Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a de...

Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wield...

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; eve...

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

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

[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reali...

Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But th...

The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobb...

There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I fe...

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse th...

Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defende...

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

Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faint...

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

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

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely t...