Christopher Hitchens Quotes

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations— he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction.

I, for example, recently finished writing an article about the latest wave of “home-grown” Islamic suicide-murderers. It was impossible not to notice one thing that their profiles and Web sites had in common. All of them complained about the impossibility of finding a woman, or sometimes a woman of sufficient piety. Meanwhile their public propaganda was hot with disgust and indignation at the phenomenon of female inchastity. The connection between repression and orgasmically violent action appeared woefully evident.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

There but for the grace of God,' said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, 'go I.' What this apparently compassionate observation really means — not that it really 'means' anything — is, 'There by the grace of God goes someone else.

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.

I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It's as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.

Cheap booze is a false economy.

What can be asserted without proof can be dissmissed without proof.

If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings, I say, 'I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.'

In this country, I've been told, 'That's offensive' as if those two words constitute an argument or a comment. Not to me they don't.

And I'm not running for anything, so I don't have to pretend to like people when I don't.

[<nowiki/>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.

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

[He]said something that made it impossible to continue working for him.[The exact words were]You're fired.

"I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument."