Christopher Hitchens Quotes

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.

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can’t fly home.

I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

There’s a big difference, as I’m sure you know, it’s a slightly manneristic one, between people of the ’60s and people of ’68. Being a soixante-huitard – it’s so nice to have a French word for it – is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the ’60s.

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.

My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There’s no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it.

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

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

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

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?

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‘naive’ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‘bonsai.’

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 think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.

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