Christopher Hitchens

Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

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.

Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.

Though it is true we are the highest and smartest animals, ospreys have eyes we have calculated to be sixty times more powerful and sophisticated than our own and that blindness, often caused by microscopic parasites that are themselves miracles of ingenuity, is one of the oldest and most tragic disorders known to man. And why award the superior eye (or in the case of cat or bat, also the ear) to the inferior species.

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 there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.

In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I'm in a small way quite proud of some of it - I only wish I'd done more.

I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

I was becoming post-ideological.

I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit.

The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage.

There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn't be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.

Who are your favourite heroines in real life? 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.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

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.