Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

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.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

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

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.

Chemotherapy isn't good for you.

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.

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.

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

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

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.

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

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.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

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

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.'

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

Obscenity comes from grime.

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 I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.