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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

(Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impote...

Christopher Hitchens

It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.

Christopher Hitchens

Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too 'Western.' It was very noticeable among the Palestinian...

Christopher Hitchens

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.

Christopher Hitchens

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Christopher Hitchens

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they d...

Christopher Hitchens

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. ...

Christopher Hitchens

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.

Christopher Hitchens

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.

Christopher Hitchens

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.

Christopher Hitchens

I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Christopher Hitchens

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way th...

Christopher Hitchens

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Christopher Hitchens

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

Christopher Hitchens

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.

Christopher Hitchens

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'

Christopher Hitchens

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

Christopher Hitchens

When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite ...

Christopher Hitchens

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

Christopher Hitchens

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.

Christopher Hitchens

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 a...

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