Christopher Hitchens Quotes

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

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.

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!’

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I’m in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn’t feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

I’m not a conservative of any kind.

I worked out early on to give up things I couldn’t do well at all.

‘WASP’ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.’

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

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.

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.

I wanted to write.

I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.