All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.


Christopher Hitchens

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

I've always felt heroic about my life... As a child, I remember little girls in the playground m...
VIVIENNE WESTWOOD
I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a sou...
JOAN DIDION
If I probably didn't have tattoos, or if I probably didn't bleach my hair, or if I probably ...
GUY FIERI
I think like a lot of people, you look back on your life and say, 'Gee, why didn't I apply m...
TONY DANZA
I have a discipline that has served me very well in my career and in my personal life... and that...
RYAN REYNOLDS
I wasn't a bad kid. My dad left when I was young, so I didn't have much discipline, not that...
DANNY DYER
I've only gotten directly offered two or three movies, ever. I don't have the luxury of bein...
MADELINE ZIMA
I'm a grown man. You know, I've been in a lot of scrapes, but I never felt like I got so - t...
JAMES STOCKDALE
I had dropped out of school and was a runaway, so I didn't have family to fall back on if I didn...
CARRE OTIS
If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and exper...
PHILIP GREENSPUN
I think I was a bit naive when I was younger. I don't know what it was: I sort of felt tunnel vi...
JENNA DEWAN
I believe that life is a journey towards God, and that no one has the right to insist that you go a ...
PAT BUCKLEY
More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't sa...
JOHN IRVING
I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a...
WATT KEY
I was offered a series by John Carpenter after I did the movie 'Christine,' and I would'...
HARRY DEAN STANTON
I always felt like I was kind of an outsider because I didn't have the right things. I didn'...
LEAH REMINI
Sometimes I felt as a writer I was purging, and it almost hurt to purge to that level. Now it doesn&...
JILL SCOTT
I may have made my reputation as a general in the Army and I'm very proud of that. But I've ...
NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF
I loved 'Dirty Sexy Money.' That didn't have a long enough shelf life. I would've li...
ZOE MCLELLAN
'Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've mad...
ERIC BROWN
I used to do crazy things that people would bail me out of, and I'm just grateful that I survive...
ERIC CLAPTON
I didn't do school plays... I've never done a play in my life, actually. Not even a nativity...
MILLIE BOBBY BROWN
If I didn't have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be lo...
ANGELINA JOLIE
I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just kn...
CHINUA ACHEBE
I have twins that I didn't want to have the life that I had. I didn't have a great life grow...
LEE DANIELS
If I wasn't a writer, I would probably be a watchmaker. I like putting puzzles together, and tha...
KARIN SLAUGHTER
My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn&...
TOM WOLFE
I don't consider myself a gangsta rapper. But I'm probably more qualified to be a gangsta ra...
COOLIO
A lot of our tracks have sounded a lot better than I thought they would because of recording, mixing...
CHARLIE WATTS
I'd rather be a Jack-of-all-trades than master of one. If I became an icon, where my whole life ...
DICK DALE
I've never thought about any kind of prejudice about women in country music because I never felt...
TAYLOR SWIFT
I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would pro...
JANE GREEN
And if I would have taken lessons I probably wouldn't have done it, and what forced me to do all...
EDDIE VAN HALEN
I was discovered out of nowhere. I didn't have family that was in the industry. I didn't kno...
BONNIE MCKEE
I always wanted to be an actress. And it wasn't ego. I felt so little about myself, considered m...
FRANCES BAY
I was always with a single mom, and we never had schedules or anything. We were just Bohemian, us ag...
BROOKE SHIELDS
I'm not as good a singer as I am an actor. So that's why I - the stories I like so much is b...
ANDY GRIFFITH
I always look back at when I didn't have a dream, when I didn't have a spirit. I didn't ...
BOB BEAMON
When I was 18, I left Dublin and moved to Paris. I didn't speak French. I didn't know anyone...
CAITRIONA BALFE
And I didn't grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that...
DAVID BENIOFF
One match that really sticks out for me, there's a bunch of matches with all the guys that I wor...
BROCK LESNAR
It's good to have a foothold in reality, a base somewhere that's always been a base. Sharman...
SEAN BIGGERSTAFF
I certainly wouldn't say that my life is a disaster, but there have been moments where I've ...
DUNCAN SHEIK
I feel like I've dreamed half of my life that hasn't happened yet, so a lot of times I'm...
MARILYN MANSON
I never felt I had anything to hide. I never felt being gay was anything to be ashamed of, so I neve...
MARTINA NAVRATILOVA
I've discovered as I've grown up that life is far more complicated than you think it is when...
RACHEL MCADAMS
'Miss Jackson' is about something that actually happened to me when I was younger. I hadn...
BRENDON URIE
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to...
JOAN DIDION
Maybe to my own detriment, but I watched all of 'Fargo' probably more than once. And I tend ...
ALLISON TOLMAN
I didn't want the public in my personal life at all - I thought that people might perceive me as...
VANILLA ICE
I think of myself more as a filmmaker or as a film person than as strictly just a writer. I don'...
PETER GOULD
People talk about that catch and, I've said this many times, that I've made better catches t...
WILLIE MAYS
I've realized how precious life is. When I was younger, I was more adventurous. I felt invincibl...
KRISTI YAMAGUCHI
I don't think there is really a favorite, I'm very fond of film making as a whole and as a m...
PETER CUSHING
I don't think there's more than half-a-dozen cartoons that I've been really truly happy ...
PAT OLIPHANT
When I was growing up, my favorite movie was 'Somewhere in Time' with Christopher Reeve, whi...
SCOTT MICHAEL FOSTER
I'm a little bit of a weirdo - I'm kind of a loner, I didn't go to college, I spend a lo...
ZOSIA MAMET
But, clearly to me, what I've come to see is that that happened because I didn't have enough...
MONICA LEWINSKY
I've been fined probably more than any driver, and I've probably paid it out of my own pocke...
KURT BUSCH
I played Woodstock in '69, and it really changed my life. Without a doubt, it was the single eve...
EDGAR WINTER
Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a t...
ALEXANDRA ADORNETTO
I don't drink coffee. I've never had a cup of coffee in my entire life. That's something...
STEVEN SPIELBERG
My salvation was a free gift. I didn't have to work for it and it's better than any gold med...
BETTY CUTHBERT
My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a come...
HOWARD SCHULTZ
I realized that day that blessings come in a variety of shapes, colors, and sizes.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
If you go back to the history of the 'Madden' game, I was probably on the cover of it half t...
JOHN MADDEN
It was part of the reason I almost didn't go public with my diagnosis - I was embarrassed. I fel...
ROBIN ROBERTS
Math just wasn't my favorite. I didn't get how important math is and how it relates to real ...
ADAM RODRIGUEZ
I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admi...
RACHEL CUSK
I've always been really hard on myself. If I didn't book a job, I would cry.
BELLA HADID
I didn't have a financial need, and I wasn't very gifted at relationships. I probably was mo...
CANDICE BERGEN
I've always made a total effort, even when the odds seemed entirely against me. I never quit try...
ARNOLD PALMER
I've stammered all my life, and it's fair to say that my stammer has shaped my life. It'...
GARETH GATES
I haven't had an orthodox career, and I've wanted more than anything to have your respect. T...
SALLY FIELD
Before discovering theater, I was sloughing off and didn't have any passion for school. Then I c...
GARY SINISE
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We...
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
I'm getting asked a lot, 'You don't have kids, so how do you know how to act like a moth...
WINONA RYDER
If I wasn't dyslexic, I probably wouldn't have won the Games. If I had been a better reader,...
CAITLYN JENNER
Sometimes I make very selfish choices; like I did 'Once Upon A Time' for my inner 8-year-old...
GINNIFER GOODWIN
I feel like maybe I'm part of that generation that became more of a gamer than a video consumer....
FELICIA DAY
I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive di...
HOWIE MANDEL
All I would say is that when I've been very down or having kind of a tough time in my life, cert...
RUPERT FRIEND
I went to college a little bit, and that didn't work out, and I didn't finish. So, I would p...
CHRIS STAPLETON
There was a time when I didn't like myself at all. I thought I was a cruel joke. But now I'v...
CEELO GREEN
During the holiday season, it's easy to forget that sometimes the best gift of all is simply the...
KATE KLISE
I've never felt that I was less of an athlete or not accomplished athletically because I didn...
MARY DECKER
I've heard that I've gotten a lighter complexion, as if I've bleached my skin. I think t...
NENE LEAKES
I've never been around pets. I didn't have pets as a child.
IOAN GRUFFUDD
First of all, when I was making the decision, I never thought that Pittsburgh fans would want me bac...
JAROMIR JAGR
I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a...
BOB SCHIEFFER
I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That ...
JOHN IRVING
Normally, I've found in my life that the louder you speak, probably, the less of a fighter you a...
DAVID DEWHURST
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as i...
ALBERT CAMUS
I was a bratty little sister. I was the youngest of three, and I often felt as though I didn't f...
DOROTHY HAMILL
I suddenly realized that the fellow who didn't show up was getting about fifty-times more money ...
GLENN FORD
Hearing aids didn't cause any problem with my social life, my career, no problem at all, and I&#...
NORM CROSBY
I've had a good run. I've built a lot of things that work and a lot of things that didn'...
CARROLL SHELBY
I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went t...
ELIZABETH STROUT
I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher ...
LIEV SCHREIBER
I didn't know I was a good director, and I mean that sincerely. I had done a film a long time ag...
JOHN RIDLEY

More Christopher Hitchens

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When Caroline Kennedy managed to say 'you know' more than 200 times in an interview with the...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll b...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particula...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, pu...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-styl...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our und...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for gra...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm crepuscular.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infec...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim under...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When I went back to Iraq again, after the liberation was complete, I was myself engaged on a sort of...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is o...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so e...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hun...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and supers...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On ever...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good fo...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affec...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks c...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He h...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
What do you most value in your friends?
Their continued existence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to w...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
On page 607, alluding to the end of my first marriage (and carefully remembering to state that that'...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was n...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky thi...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite agai...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affec...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-ch...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imper...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in p...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows t...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not pu...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from cele...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to st...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Chemotherapy isn't good for you.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most u...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repud...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous t...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who ris...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possi...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a su...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Say 'Toronto' or 'Ontario,' and the immediate thought associations are with a somewh...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many p...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aun...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The violence in the Bible is appalling.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,&...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most b...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Sus...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[T]he very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made u...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion abou...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or t...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the ha...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert t...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I don't consider myself to be that credulous.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be te...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms,...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialec...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don&#...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The one unforgivable sin is to be boring
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never ag...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and g...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It would be nice to think that the menacing aspects of North Korea were for display also, that the b...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every li...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful becaus...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instea...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatev...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
As I never tire of saying, heat is not the antithesis of light but rather the source of it.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on ut...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate onese...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front f...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in rememb...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn dir...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you di...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indi...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper an...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I vote and I do jury duty.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, i...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is ap...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelie...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had�...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I still think like a Marxist in many ways.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I think the materialist conception of history is valid.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A terrible thing has now happened to religion. Except in the places where it can still enforce itsel...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by bein...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The many instances of forged miracles, and prophecies, and supernatural events, which, in all ages, ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, l...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
only while under the dominion of fear do men fall a prey to superstition; that all the portents ever...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Thus it is brought prominently before us, that superstition’s chief victims are those persons who ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for momen...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A saving grace of the human condition (if I may phrase it like that) is a sense of humor. Many write...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-mad...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, fo...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It is certain, that, in every religion, however sublime the verbal definition which it gives of its ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Believing then … that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one’s natural pessimis...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to “encourage a hope that the human mind will s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
How sad to be a woman—not to know Aught of the glory of this breast of snow, All unconcerned to co...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of g...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other word...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To be charitable, one may admit that the religious often seem unaware of how insulting their main pr...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of g...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death i...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the r...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the sp...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or un...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and re...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything i...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John B...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had n...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, bu...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the childre...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The onl...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to th...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really no...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adher...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Naz...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But th...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to th...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS