Quotes by Christopher Hitchens

About Christopher Hitchens:

Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English author, literary critic, and journalist who spent much of his career in the United States and became an American citizen.
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Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

Christopher Hitchens

The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause.

Christopher Hitchens

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could ...

Christopher Hitchens

The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure h...

Christopher Hitchens

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. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the ...

Christopher Hitchens

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.

Christopher Hitchens

The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and said magnificent things when it came to Ireland, India ...

Christopher Hitchens

The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhowe...

Christopher Hitchens

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

Christopher Hitchens

I have been taunted on various platforms recently for becoming a neo-conservative, and have been the object of some fascinating web-site and blog stuff, from the isolationist Right as well as from the peaceniks, who both argue in a semi-literate way ...

Christopher Hitchens

The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble an...

Christopher Hitchens

To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.

Christopher Hitchens

Revolution from above, in some states and cases, is [...] often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.

Christopher Hitchens

Some lurid things have been said about me—that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth—that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been tru...

Christopher Hitchens

The belief that the world was created yesterday seems to hold great appeal to those born at that time.

Christopher Hitchens

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very gru...

Christopher Hitchens

I can remember when I was a bit of an ETA fan myself. It was in 1973, when a group of Basque militants assassinated Adm. Carrero Blanco. The admiral was a stone-faced secret police chief, personally groomed to be the successor to the decrepit Francis...

Christopher Hitchens

I’m different,” said the Kid. “My gran always said I was half clever, half stupid, and half crazy.

Christopher Hitchens

It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use o...

Christopher Hitchens

No such word as . No such word as neither!

Christopher Hitchens

Standing in the corridor was a large plastic bin on wheels. He looked inside. Empty tins of dog food. That explained the spaghetti with meat sauce. Oh well, he'd eaten worse.

Christopher Hitchens

Author Bio

  • NameChristopher Hitchens
  • DescriptionBritish American author and journalist
  • BornApril 13, 1949
  • DiedDecember 15, 2011
  • CountryUnited Kingdom; United States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist; Writer; Essayist; Autobiographer
  • AwardsRichard Dawkins Award