Quotes from 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.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.

I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice.

Obscenity comes from grime.

It's considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don't see why that's considered a normal thing.

I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it's employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Arguments that explain everything... explain nothing

There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.

If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings, I say, 'I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.

To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.