Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There's a general tendency—not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them—to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one.

Only the liberals and soft-leftists persist in agonizing as they give their (actually unqualified) loyalty, in advance, to people who publicly spit on them. I don't know whether the masochist or the sadist commits the greater evil, but I do know that you can't have one without the other.

Nose-hairs gone: runny nostrils. Constipation and diarrhea alternating

A high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

Paine and Joel Barlow attempted to change Jefferson's mind, urging him to settle thrifty German immigrants in the new lands and to permit black families to travel from other states to acquire their own land there, but the sugar interest triumphed

Allegiance is a powerful force in human affairs; it will not do to treat someone as a mental serf if he is convinced that his thralldom is honorable and voluntary. From

The lawbreaking itch is not always an anarchic one. In the first place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural resistance to coercion. We don't like to be pushed and shoved, even if it's in a direction we might choose to go. In the second place, the human personality has (or ought to have) a natural sense of the preposterous.

As Bertie Wooster once phrased it, they experienced some difficulty in detecting the bluebird.

His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.

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.

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is, that the objects of which we have no experience, resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual, is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

the awareness that the distinction between "over here" and "over there," or between "home" and "abroad" is often a false one has never left me.

why has the blowjob had a dual existence for so long, sometimes subterranean and sometimes flaunted, before bursting into plain view as the specifically American sex act?

if he had said otherwise. To admit that a thermonuclear catastrophe would be the end of civilization and of the biosphere would be, in religious terms, profane and defeatist. All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and

If you want to take part in the "war" against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.

we are all stardust, or nuclear waste depending on your analysis

Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward.

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

Today I want to puke when I hear the word "radical" applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.)

A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.

he amended the thought to say that men were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," thus

every time the secret police close in, our heroes are able to "disapparate"—a term that always makes me think of an attempt at English by George W. Bush.