Christopher Hitchens
The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.Collection: Politics
It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Travel
Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.Collection: Truth
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.Collection: Trust
I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.Collection: Humor
Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.Collection: Religion
Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: War
A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.Collection: Hope
To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.Collection: Faith
In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: Food
I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.Collection: Respect
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.Collection: Attitude
Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.Collection: Experience
I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.Collection: Relationship
Of course, I do everything for money.Collection: Money
'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.Collection: Age
I think the materialist conception of history is valid.Collection: History
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.Collection: Amazing
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.Collection: Technology
I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.Collection: War
I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.Collection: Women
To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?Collection: Women
When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.Collection: Time
If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.Collection: Society
A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.
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.
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.
Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.
To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'
Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
I'm crepuscular.
I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.
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.
Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.
In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.
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 true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.