Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

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.

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.

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.'

I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

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.

You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.

I like surprises.

When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.

I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.

The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.

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

I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.