Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.

I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

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

I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.

Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.

The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone.

I don't consider myself to be that credulous.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.

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

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd. The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: "anima"—the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

The noble title of dissident must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.