Christopher Hitchens Quotes

How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.

Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.

[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your 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.

How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.