Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

If you can talk, you can write.

In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.

I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.

I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has.

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.

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.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

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.

'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

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 love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.

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.

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.

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.