Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

I like surprises.

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.

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.

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

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.

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

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

It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.

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.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

I worked out early on to give up things I couldn't do well at all.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.

If you can talk, you can write.

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