Christopher Hitchens

I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is 'naive' spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of 'bonsai.'

Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. 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.

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.

No moral person would do such a thing unless they thought it was divinely warranted.

If you think all this is going on, all these gigantic fields of gravity and light with you in mind, then you really do have a self-centredness problem.

Redemption is promised at the low price of surrender of your critical faculties.

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity

As I've said before, you can be an atheist and anything you like.

There's no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified there. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.

One can't indefinitely do for somebody what he is reluctant to do for himself.

Arguments that explain everything... explain nothing

Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries .

Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.

Shepherds don't look after sheep because they love them - although I do think some shepherds like their sheep too much. They look after their sheep so they can, first, fleece them and second, turn them into meat. That's much more like the priesthood as I know it.