Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.


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

The unfortunate thing is that, sometimes, we slip, but, fortunately, consciously or unconsciously, w...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
How should I know?" said Alice, surprised at her own courage. "It's no business of mine."
The Q...
LEWIS CARROLL
I don't know if I have a favorite color.
KATE MIDDLETON
It's very special having a new little girl.
KATE MIDDLETON
When a man gives you a rose what you see may not be what he intends. You may think he sees you as de...
PATRICK ROTHFUSS
May I never neither turn left nor turn right in my journey of life, but may I go straight to Christ ...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
She said 'Over my dead body!' so I took her at her word.
DIANA WYNNE JONES
The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being a...
NEIL GAIMAN
What is the Other?" they ask.
The Other is the one who taught me whatI should be like, but not ...
PAULO COELHO
Look, my friends!' he called. 'Here's a pretty hobbit-skin to wrap an elven princeling in! If it wer...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Like all best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
My husband has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I owe him a debt greater ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I have to be seen to be believed.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughou...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in th...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something e...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts an...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Grief is the price we pay for love.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a nobl...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Chr...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses w...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your s...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are g...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the man...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
These wretched babies don't come until they are ready.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
The events that I have attended to mark my Diamond Jubilee have been a humbling experience. It has t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and o...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
We'll sort of get over the marriage first and then maybe look at the kids. But obviously we want...
PRINCE WILLIAM
Family is the most important thing in the world.
PRINCESS DIANA
You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I ...
CATHERINE THE GREAT
With the right help, children have a good chance of overcoming their issues while they are still you...
KATE MIDDLETON
As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.
KING SOLOMON
I don't mind a big fascinator. I think there is more scope for artwork in a fascinator rather th...
ZARA PHILLIPS
I was always told from the hat-makers that you should have your hair up because it shows the hat mor...
ZARA PHILLIPS
I don't think I'll still be riding at 40. There are a couple of people who are still riding ...
ZARA PHILLIPS
My dad's not a big talker.
ZARA PHILLIPS
My dad can be pretty critical sometimes.
ZARA PHILLIPS
I'd love to have kids, but not at the moment.
ZARA PHILLIPS
You cannot make horses 'safe.'
ZARA PHILLIPS
Virtually everything that gets printed about me is wrong anyway, so it doesn't really matter wha...
ZARA PHILLIPS
It's stupid to say that I don't like being in the public eye, but I don't like doing stu...
ZARA PHILLIPS
I'm an affectionate person.
ZARA PHILLIPS
People still text me to say that there is something about me in the paper, and what really annoys me...
ZARA PHILLIPS
Sometimes people will come up in the street and say: 'My daughter loves you, will you sign an au...
ZARA PHILLIPS
Taking part in an Olympics on home ground is something you dream about.
ZARA PHILLIPS
My brother and I have been able to get on and have been very lucky to do things with our family that...
ZARA PHILLIPS
I don't think about the media.
ZARA PHILLIPS
I love the sport and being competitive.
ZARA PHILLIPS
The horses are all characters, all personalities. Some you get along with, some you don't, some ...
ZARA PHILLIPS
I hate having my picture taken.
ZARA PHILLIPS
Unfortunately in sport it's either good or bad. You've got to take the highs and the lows.
ZARA PHILLIPS
My mother is massively into sailing, so we always had Musto clothes, and it went on from there, real...
ZARA PHILLIPS
The senior members of the royal family work very hard and I don't think people quite realise tha...
ZARA PHILLIPS
In our sport you're very lucky to find a horse of a lifetime and I found mine relatively early. ...
ZARA PHILLIPS
I don't have a stylist, and I do most of my shopping online, just because it's easier. I don...
ZARA PHILLIPS
I think Facebook's dangerous. So many people I know get into trouble with Facebook... I'd ra...
ZARA PHILLIPS
I'm not a princess anyway so I find that quite weird to be labelled as one.
ZARA PHILLIPS
Smoking is hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.
KING JAMES I
My dear mamma is quite right when she says that we must lay down principles and not depart from them...
MARIE ANTOINETTE
I never make a trip to the United States without visiting a supermarket. To me they are more fascina...
WALLIS SIMPSON
PS: It's all gossip about the prince. I'm not in the habit of taking my girlfriends' bea...
WALLIS SIMPSON
I am so anxious for you not to abdicate and I think the fact that you do is going to put me in the w...
WALLIS SIMPSON
I hate this place. I shall hate it to my grave.
WALLIS SIMPSON
I look a hundred and weigh 110 - you won't love me when you see the wreck England has made me.
WALLIS SIMPSON
A woman's life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compe...
WALLIS SIMPSON
Never explain, never complain.
WALLIS SIMPSON
You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance.
WALLIS SIMPSON
I have always had the courage for the new things that life sometimes offers.
WALLIS SIMPSON
For a gallant spirit there can never be defeat.
WALLIS SIMPSON
Forgive me for not writing but this man is exhausting.
WALLIS SIMPSON
You can never be too rich or too thin.
WALLIS SIMPSON
A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
KING SOLOMON
It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most...
FREDERICK THE GREAT
Addiction is a hugely complex and destructive disease, and its impact can be simply devastating. All...
KATE MIDDLETON
There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.
MARIE ANTOINETTE
I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all.
MARIE ANTOINETTE
I think change needs to be egoless. It's not about my leaving my fingerprints or a legacy. It...
QUEEN RANIA OF JORDAN
We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.
QUEEN VICTORIA
I can make a lord, but only God can make a gentleman.
KING JAMES I
I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
CHARLES V
I feel very, very lucky that George has got a little sister.
KATE MIDDLETON
It would be doing me great injustice to think that I have any feeling of indifference to my country;...
MARIE ANTOINETTE
I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.
AUGUSTUS
A crown is merely a hat that lets the rain in.
FREDERICK THE GREAT
Nothing is more useless in developing a nation's economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road...
HUSSEIN OF JORDAN

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