Top 667 Quotes & Sayings by Christopher Hitchens - Page 3

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

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

I feel Anglo-American.

I was becoming post-ideological.

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.

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.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I'm in a small way quite proud of some of it - I only wish I'd done more.

I like surprises.

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.

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.

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.

The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.

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

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

I don't consider myself to be that credulous.

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

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it's employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.

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

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.

I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

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.

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.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

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.

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.

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.

I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.

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

Of course, I do everything for money.

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.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

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.

The citizens of Tumortown are forever assailed with cures and rumors of cures.

You can only have one aim per debate.

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

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

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

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.

I wanted to write.

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

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

A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.