Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

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

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.

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

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.

If you can talk, you can write.

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.

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

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.

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

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.

All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.

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.

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.