Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.'

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

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.

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

It doesn't take much to make me angry.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.

Littera scripta manet - 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.

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 retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.

To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'