Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Some statements are too blunt for everyday, consensual discourse. In national "debate," it is the smoother pebbles that are customarily gathered from the stream, and used as projectiles. They leave less of a scar, even when they hit. Occasionally, however, a single hard-edged remark will inflict a deep and jagged wound, a gash so ugly that it must be cauterized at once. In

Lefever describes his financing plan with modesty: 'Our detailed budget is realistic, but does not take into account the inflation that may occur before September 1983. The one place it could cut or reduce is item 7, the simultaneous interpreter services, if these services could be provided gratis by the U.S. government.' In other words, the only way to make a saving on a U.S.-subsidized project is to take money out of another U.S.-subsidized column.

the ministries of the Church are regarded by the masses merely as dignities, her offices as posts of emolument—in short, popular religion may be summed up as respect for ecclesiastics.

Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves; in any case they are, as I was once taught to say, tackling the man and not the ball.

The tribe that confuses its totems and symbols with reality has succumbed to fetishism and may be in more trouble than it realises.

people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.

The curse of Abraham continues to poison Hebron, but the religious warrant for blood sacrifice poisons our entire civilization.

The prerogative of the Crown; the enthronement of 'The Crown in Parliament', is the special and particular symbol of our status as subjects instead of citizens. It is a rubbing in of the fact that we have no rights, properly understood, but rather traditions that depend on the caprice of a political compromise made in 1688.

Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.

The liberality of the age, or in other words the weakening of the obstinate prejudice, which makes men unable to see what is before their eyes because it is contrary to their expectations, has caused it to be very commonly admitted that a Deist may be truly religious: but if religion stands for any graces of character and not for mere dogma, the assertion may equally be made of many whose belief is far short of Deism.

the razor of Ockham is clean and decisive.

Next time you hear that tone of self-regard, you might like to pick up Dispatches for the New York Tribune and read the only reporter of whom it was ever actually true.

Thus did I begin to see, or thought I began to see, how the British Conservatives kept the fierce, irrational loyalty of those whom they exploited.

Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think — made me think for many years — that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.

It is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality.

Sartre distinguished between rebels and revolutionaries. The rebel, he says, secretly quite wants the world and the system to remain as it is. Its permanence, after all, is the guarantee of his continuing ability to rebel. The revolutionary, in contrast, really wishes to overthrow and replace existing conditions. The second enterprise is obviously no laughing matter.

as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

Also, ordinary expressions like "expiration date" … will I outlive my Amex?

Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven—except as a place of either worldly comfort, eternal tedium, or (as Tertullian thought) continual relish in the torture of others.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory.

I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. For so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane.

every day represents more and more subtracted from less and less

He Showed Up. Throughout his life and times, whenever and wherever something important was on the line, he presented himself.

Getting my breath back and managing a brief statement in my cut-glass Oxford tones, I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked.