Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

The dullest person, after all, has gleaned from mere observation that highly intelligent parents often produce offspring so stupid that they can barely breathe. (And, much more interesting from the eugenic point of view, that the opposite is also true.)

The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.

George Orwell once observed that if Napoléon Bonaparte had been cut down by a musket ball as he entered Moscow, he would have been remembered as the greatest general since Alexander.

In the late 1940s, a dystopian novel based on the notorious horrors of 'National Socialism' would probably have been very well-received. But it would have done nothing to shake the complacency of Western intellectuals concerning the system of state terror for which, at the time, so many of them had either a blind spot or a soft spot.

Ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men

Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.

I've always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don't really respect anyone who falls for Camelot.

There is an old Belfast joke about the man stopped at a roadblock and asked his religion. When he replies that he is an atheist he is asked, "Protestant or Catholic atheist?

Si me convierto será porque es preferible que muera un creyente a que lo haga un ateo.

Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. All the News That's Fit to Print, it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

Like the quality of mercy, the prompting of compassion is not finite, and can be self-replenishing.

Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking.

As long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffuse feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.

Almost all religions from Buddhism to Islam feature either a humble prophet or a prince who comes to identify with the poor, but what is this if not populism? It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone.

If one must have faith in order to believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding and has confronted us with findings far more miraculous and transcendent than any theology.

There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do.

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

Every day one reads meretricious babble about 'globalization' and the abolition of frontiers, most of it amounting to little more than celebration of the worldwide availability of Wheel of Fortune .

A few months ago, I was sitting morosely at my desk, wondering why I had ever agreed to review Barbara Bush: A Memoir for an English newspaper. The experience was proving to be a degradation of the act of reading. Imagine, if you will, being strapped into a chair and made to listen to Liberace playing the piano for hour upon hour. Or imagine being fed chocolate dinner mints, like a hapless goose, until you are on the verge of explosion. Such was my lot.

I have the impression that if the armchair generals arguers got their way and asked only war veterans what to do about Saddam Hussein, there would have been a rather abrupt regime change in Iraq long before now.

Even the constantly reiterated insistence that we are miserable offenders, born in sin, is a kind of inverted arrogance: such vanity, to presume that our moral conduct has some sort of cosmic significance, as though the Creator of the Universe wouldn't have better things to do than tot up our black marks and our brownie points.