Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Quotes by and about Christopher Hitchens

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Hitchens: "I have very few friends, only acquaintances. ... I don't like most people [and] I find it very easy indeed to quarrel with them."

Hitchens: "I think that hatred ... is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental ... there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick."

Hitchens: "Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence."

Hitchens: "I sometimes wish I had a large family to fall back on, but I was never much of a family values person."

Hitchens: "I don't ask what [others] think of me, but I sometimes wonder if they ask themselves what I think of them. But I'm at pains to tell them; to dissolve any doubt."

Hitchens: "I admire Trotsky because he combined in himself the role of man of action and man of ideas."

Hitchens: "Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. ... And [Michael Moore] actually embodies all of those qualities."

Hitchens: "One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on."

[On writing:]
Hitchens: "Everybody does have a book in them. But in most cases, that's where it should stay."

[Reviewing Bob Woodward's book 'State of Denial':]
Hitchens: "I try to maintain a relationship with language and style; Woodward doesn't care. His writing is almost unreadable. His book is much harder to read than it must have been to write."

[On the controversial use of cluster bombs:]
Hitchens: "Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves. But when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect."

Hitchens: "[The New Testament] is a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts to make things come out right."

Hitchens: "[The Christian idea of Heaven is] endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea."

Hitchens: "Johnnie Walker Black [is the] breakfast of champions, accept no substitute."

[On being diagnosed with cancer:]
Hitchens: "I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light."

Sam Harris: "[He was] one of the best writers to ever draw breath."

Anne Applebaum: "[He had a] sense of humor so dry you could hear it crack."

Jacob Weisberg: "His originality was a constant, his independence an unstoppable engine."

John Cook: "Hitchens [clung to his] ardor for the invasion of Iraq ... long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made."

Sam Harris: "With friends like [Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, A.C. Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, and Steven Pinker] it has become increasingly difficult to say something stupid."