Christopher Hitchens Quotes

It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on — but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection that I think most upsets people about their demise. All right, then, because it might make us feel better, let’s pretend the opposite. Instead, you’ll get tapped on the shoulder and told, Great news: this party’s going on forever — and you can’t leave. You’ve got to stay; the boss says so. And he also insists that you have a good time.

Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell.

I once heard Susan Sontag, in conversation with Umberto Eco, define the polymath as one “who is interested in everything, and in nothing else.”

Periclean Greeks employed the term idiotis, without any connotation of stupidity or subnormality, to mean simply 'a person indifferent to public affairs.' Obviously, there is something wanting in the apolitical personality. But we have also come to suspect the idiocy of politicization — of the professional pol and power broker. The two idiocies make a perfect match, with the apathy of the first permitting the depredations of the second.

I'm very happy by myself — I'm lucky in that way — if I've got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.

Actually — and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable — some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan — 'a land without a people for a people without a land' — disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?

Many are the cheap and easy laughs in which one could indulge at the extraordinary, pitiful hysteria of those attempting to see something suspect, or even less than laudable, in Dick Cheney’s entirely justified, indeed, necessary, shooting of Harry Whittington. According to no less an authority than the so-called ‘Daily’ Kos, Mr Whittington apparently had a ‘right’ (granted by whom?) to wander, uncalled for and unmarked, directly into the sites of the man who was praised for his shooting by no less an authority than Lee ‘Harvey’ Oswald, back in the days when the Democratic Party still fought against totalitarianism, before the Jihadist wing of the extremist party of the Michael Moore faction staged their grisly coup ‘d’etat’ (a French word meaning, originally ‘Islamo-jihadist of the Left’ [...] but no less an authority than an old friend of mine who works and fights high up in the upper echelons of the so called state ‘department’ a man entirely untouched by the vagaries and conspiracies of the thuggish authoritarianism of the so called ‘C’ IA which ran through the cobbled streets of the State like a veritable whirlwind of Reaganite self-certainty, disenobling the watery flow of power from that much vaunted fountain of secularism best known as the white ‘house’ to those too ignorant to realise its true role as the ‘house’ of the illuminati: as this man, to repeat, told me, myself, and, indeed, I (or as it were, we) this Mr Whittington was on his way, even as Dick unleashed his mighty cannon, to buy uranium from Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, who are, as we speak, meeting on the so called ‘far’ side of the moon in order to unveil a proto-’ji’ hadist empire of neo-caliphatinism a word that, were it to be real, would be no less real than the threat of apres-jihadist terror that my good friend ‘dick’ had the temerity, indeed, the accuracy, to stop.

As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.

As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.

You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal President successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so.

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

Donald Trump – a ludicrous figure, but at least he’s lived it up a bit in the real world and at least he’s worked out how to cover 90 per cent of his skull with 30 per cent of his hair.

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.

The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobsters, anal sex and picnics.

Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.