Christopher Hitchens

People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

'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 that the other hyphenations just are not.

There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.

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

I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

I'm terrified of losing my voice.

I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

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

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

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

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

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

You can only have one aim per debate.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.