Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.

I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it.

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.

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

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