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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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 terrified of losing my voice.

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.

I'm not a conservative of any kind.

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.