Quotes by Christopher Hitchens

"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."

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

"Of course, I do everything for money."

"I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor."

"A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope."

"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."

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

"I think the materialist conception of history is valid."

"'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."

"The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply."

"One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue."

"When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early."

"High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments."

"A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular."

"Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt."

"Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it."

"Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God."

"And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home."

"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."

"Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake."