Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy 'legacy' is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and "torch-passing" rhetoric in general.

I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

It's a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has God in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride.

If the Qur'an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.

If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.

It's amazing how relaxing it is not to claim you know more than you do. I'm surprised that those who claim to speak in the name of god don't take more advantage of this relief.

There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.

A good liar must have a good memory.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.

I am, I hope, never offensive by accident.

Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.

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.

I'm dying, but so are you

I'm not a conservative of any kind.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.