Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.
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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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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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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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Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, 'taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power.' History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.
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It Obama's Nobel peace prize would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.
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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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In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
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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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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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Inanity is pretending that Afghanistan will go away if we leave.
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There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.
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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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Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power.
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Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!
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Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.
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If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
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Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed 'we' did. Well, does that not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power?
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Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
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The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.