Christopher Hitchens Quotes

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can’t be English American. Why not?

A gentleman is never rude except on purpose – I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.

Obscenity comes from grime.

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

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.

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.

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.’

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

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.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

I don’t have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I’ve been too lucky and that I’m over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.