Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.

I wanted to write.

A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

I don't have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I've been too lucky and that I'm over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated.

For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.

I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice.

You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.

Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.

I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not put together like the other chaps.

You can only have one aim per debate.

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

I feel Anglo-American.

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.