Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. 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.

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 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 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.

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.

Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

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

Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

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

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.

‚WASP‘ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

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.

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.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.

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.‘

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

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.

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.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

If you can talk, you can write.

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

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.

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

I’m not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

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.

I’ve proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.

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.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

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

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

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

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.

Say ‚Toronto‘ or ‚Ontario,‘ and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency.

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?

Of course, I do everything for money.

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.‘

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.

I don’t think consensus-building politics is what I’m meant to be doing.

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.

The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head – chemo-brain they call it. It’s awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.

I’m not resigned, but I’m realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it’s a certainty you’ll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it’s an awful process.

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

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts.

I’m not a conservative of any kind.

I was becoming post-ideological.

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

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.

I vote and I do jury duty.

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’m not a sheep.

I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, ‚He is not a lush.‘ That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, ‚Look!‘

It’s not at all good when your cancer is ‚palpable‘ from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.