Christopher Hitchens

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

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.

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

If you can charm everyone it means you dont care about anyone in particular.

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

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 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.

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

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

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

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

When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early.

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

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

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.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

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

One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.

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

In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

Littera scripta manet - 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.

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

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

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 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 felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

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'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

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

I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

You can only have one aim per debate.

I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

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.

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.

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

Perhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

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 affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

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.

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.

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

There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.

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?

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

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

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.

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 worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.

'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

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

I like surprises.

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

I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, 'He is not a lush.' That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, 'Look!'

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.

Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.

I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

I'm not a sheep.

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.

I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.

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

The problem with open-mindedness is that it can become empty-mindedness.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

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

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

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

To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.'

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'

The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.

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.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.

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.

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.

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of 'like' has spread through the idiom of the young. And it's true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.

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.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

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

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.