Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

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

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

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

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.

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

All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.

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

I was becoming post-ideological.

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.

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

It's considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don't see why that's considered a normal thing.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

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

Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.

Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.

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

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

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

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

A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.

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.

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.

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

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

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.