It’s surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends. – Christopher Hitchens
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument. – Christopher Hitchens
A gentleman is never rude except on purpose – I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me. – Christopher Hitchens
Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation. – Christopher Hitchens
I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat. – Christopher Hitchens
No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis. – Christopher Hitchens
There’s been some research in cognitive science, I’m told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it’s white noise. – Christopher Hitchens
Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday. – Christopher Hitchens
George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as ‘evil.’ Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. – Christopher Hitchens
When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‘I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,’ and so forth, I switch off quite early. – Christopher Hitchens
I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way. – Christopher Hitchens
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God. – Christopher Hitchens
I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. – Christopher Hitchens
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. – Christopher Hitchens
‘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. – Christopher Hitchens
I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living. – Christopher Hitchens
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!’ – Christopher Hitchens
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up. – Christopher Hitchens
My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist. – Christopher Hitchens
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation. – Christopher Hitchens
The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion. – Christopher Hitchens
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible. – Christopher Hitchens
If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women. – Christopher Hitchens
The fact is: It’s true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it. – Christopher Hitchens