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

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

Christopher Hitchens

There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn't say wh...

Christopher Hitchens

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience onc...

Christopher Hitchens

Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu—actually of the prices not the courses—outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once th...

Christopher Hitchens

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.

Christopher Hitchens

Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.

Christopher Hitchens

Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner.

Christopher Hitchens

Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim ci...

Christopher Hitchens

All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt i...

Christopher Hitchens

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements—and found that they called themselves or—it sounded just as bad in English—'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party...

Christopher Hitchens

What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.

Christopher Hitchens

Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a wom...

Christopher Hitchens

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or ...

Christopher Hitchens

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think ...

Christopher Hitchens

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where w...

Christopher Hitchens

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the s...

Christopher Hitchens

It was at a conference in Cyprus in 1976, where the theme was the rights of small nations, that I first met Edward Said. It was impossible not to be captivated by him: of his many immediately seductive qualities I will start by mentioning a very impo...

Christopher Hitchens

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.

Christopher Hitchens

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'...

Christopher Hitchens

Offered a job as book critic for magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely inf...

Christopher Hitchens

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in , and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Ed...

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