Christopher Hitchens Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‘naive’ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‘bonsai.’

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.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

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

I’m not a conservative of any kind.

Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.

There’s a big difference, as I’m sure you know, it’s a slightly manneristic one, between people of the ’60s and people of ’68. Being a soixante-huitard – it’s so nice to have a French word for it – is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the ’60s.

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

It doesn’t take much to make me angry.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.