Quotes About Hitchens

I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

Far too many people—many of them academics, many politicians—continue to jabber about a supposed 'special relationship' between our two coun

Britain is a desirable place to live mainly because it is an island, which most people can't get to.

The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian's fixation on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis, he became one himself.

Christopher Hitchens, the late essayist and sot, was a man who purposefully cultivated a lot of friends of a certain type - rich, self-important, generally dim-witted and hence easy for a well-spoken Oxbridge debater to impress - and he electrified Washington D.C. society mainly by not being a completely charmless bore.

All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens—a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins—is talking out of the back of his neck.

Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.

Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.

I haven't seen much socially redeeming about religion. I'm an atheist. I don't here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It's boring.

Hitchens: Since we only have one life to live, I can help people make it free as best I can, and assist them in their real struggle for liberty, which in its most essential form, is the struggle against theocracy, which is the original form of dictatorship and the violation of human rights.

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

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.

She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.

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.

I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.

People keep saying, God is in the details. He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.

I can see why people find him [Hugo Chávez] charming. He's very ebullient, as they say. I've heard him make a speech, though, and he has a vice that's always very well worth noticing because it's always a bad sign: he doesn't know when to sit down. He's worse than Castro was. He won't shut up. Then he told me that he didn't think the United States landed on the moon and didn't believe in the existence of Osama bin Laden. He thought all of this was all a put-up job. He's a wacko.

I am sometimes asked about the concept or definition of a 'public intellectual,' and though I find the whole idea faintly silly, I believe it should ideally mean that the person so identified is self-sustaining and autonomously financed. Susan was pre-eminently one such.

At the time, the United States had an attorney general named John Ashcroft, who had stated that America had "no king but Jesus" (a claim that was exactly two words too long).

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 .

To begin with a summary of Paine's astonishing life and career is to commence with a sense of wonder that he was ever able to emerge at all.

and showed him to be a villa-dwelling dependent and not an ascetic cave-dwelling guerrilla.

On page 603 it is stated that at first Blumenthal could not remember the lunch with me and my wife at which he had loudly impugned two female witnesses against Clinton. This makes it distinctly odd that he should have such have a vivid and detailed but mistaken recollection of the same lunch on page 607.