Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

Littera scripta manet - 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.

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

I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, 'He is not a lush.' That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, 'Look!'

I'm not a sheep.

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

The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts.

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

I vote and I do jury duty.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

I don't consider myself to be that credulous.

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 sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.

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

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

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

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.

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

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

Of course, I do everything for money.

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.

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.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

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.

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.