Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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I'm not afraid of death myself, because I'm not gonna know I'm dead. I'm awed a bit by the idea, but I'm perfectly reconciled to it. Certainly I am, as everyone is, reconciled to everyone else's death but their own. They think an exception can be made in their own case.
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It's a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has God in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride.
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If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka.
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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 shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.
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When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul.
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There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.
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'Peace through Strength,' surely history's most exploded nostrum.
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Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone (Michael Moore) who actually embodies all of those qualities.
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What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.
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The progress that's made … in any argument or in any discussion is by confrontation. That's a dialectical fact. People say 'oh let's have less heat and more light,' fatuously. There's only one source of light. It happens to be heat.
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My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.
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To the dumb question 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
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David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.
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Even if the U.S. doesn't attack Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion.
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We are not occupying Afghanistan, we are there as guests of a government, at their request.
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Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!
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We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.
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The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
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'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals... But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age.
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It’s a very vulgar, arithmetical, pragmatic way of arguing anyway. If you do that, then get the facts and figures wrong, well then you’re really fucked. You’re fucked twice.
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One could happily make a case that more random civilians, and fewer fucking lawyers, should be on the court. But the only other thing to say about Miers is that she is a fucking lawyer.
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The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.
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The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. 'Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process?'
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George W. Bush is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.