Christopher Hitchens Quotes

If you can talk, you can write.

I’ve been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

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.

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

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

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.

I like surprises.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

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

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

‘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.

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.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.

If you can charm everyone it means you don’t care about anyone in particular.

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