Christopher Hitchens Quotes:

Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.

Topics: Jesus, Father, Teaching

I'm not afraid of being dead, that's to say there's nothing to be afraid of. I won't know I'm dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I'm alive in any way at all, that'll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.

Topics: Strong, Would Be, Alive, Pleasant Surprises

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.209, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Religious, Children, Age, Age Of Reason, God Is Not Great

One can't live without fear, it's a question of what is your attitude towards fear? I'm afraid of a sordid death. I'm afraid that I will die in an ugly or squalid way, and cancer can be very vigorous in that respect.

Topics: Attitude, Cancer, Ugly, Live Without Fear, Vigorous

I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

Topics: Religious, Atheist, Church

If people I've never met or don't know say that what I've written or done or said means anything to them, then I'm happy to take it at face value, for once. It cheers me up.

Topics: Cheer, Mean, People, Cheer Me Up, Face Value

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

Topics: Character, Accomplishment, Moral, Moral Character

I'd like to prove to other people that it's not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer.

Topics: Cancer, People, Ends

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

Topics: Uplifting, Strong, Atheist, Bazaars, God Is Not Great

I have a strong constitution which has served me quite well, though if I hadn't had such a strong one I might have led a more healthy life perhaps.

Topics: Strong, Healthy, Might, Healthy Life

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

Topics: Racism, Stupidity, Superstitions

If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn.

Topics: Cancer, Bohemian

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

Topics: Animal, Patterns, Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theory

The thing about religion is that it's the first and the worst. The worst because it's the first.

Topics: Firsts, Worst

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.140, Basic Books

Topics: Courage, Selfish, Science, Live For Others, Unfairness

Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.

Topics: Crazy, Believe, Intelligent, Wacky, Crazy Things

If asked my opinion about virginity, I would say, "I'm opposed to it." I don't think it deserves to be celebrated, at any rate. Or at least, if I'm not opposed, I'm very highly skeptical and critical of it.

Topics: Thinking, Opinion, Rate

Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.

Topics: Real, Iran, Iraq, Theocracy

I'm not very impressed by people who yell "traitor" and "communist" and other less printable things. I don't like it.

Topics: People, Communist, Traitor

I would say that if you don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you're really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Topics: Christian, Meaningful, Jesus

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

Topics: Atheist, Religion, Atheism, God Is Not Great

It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.

Topics: Country, Atheist, Law, Pluralism Is

As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.

Topics: Lying, Ocean, Alive, Compunction

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Topics: Silence, Stupidity, Sake

MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

Topics: Mother, Empowerment, Suffering, Teresa, Livestock

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.

Topics: Jesus, Texas, Taught, God Is Not Great

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.

Topics: Atheist, Ideas, Mind, Subtle Atheist

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Topics: Country, Atheist, Atheism, Subtle Atheist

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

Topics: Real, Party, Thinking

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation - is that good for the world?

Topics: Atheist, Children, World, Subtle Atheist, Child Abuse

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Topics: Atheist, Vintage, Doubt, Ripening, Kool Aid

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.44, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Children, Ignorance, Racism, Tribalism, Contemptuous

I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.

Topics: Light, Lovely, Ends

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.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2007). “The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever”, p.16, Da Capo Press

Topics: Inspirational, Dog, Cat, Daily Atheist, Cat Food

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Topics: Inspirational, Wisdom, Science, Anti Religious, Subtle Atheist

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

Topics: Coward, Used, Fascists, Islamophobia, Manipulator

What they [the 9/11 attackers] abominate about 'the west', to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.

Topics: Inquiry, Phrases, West

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Topics: Selfish, Thinking, Touching, Quaint

There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis.

Topics: Atheist, Regret, Reflection, Convicts

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

Topics: Religion, Important, Atheism

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

Topics: Laughing, Religion, Essentials, Blasphemy, Emancipation

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

Topics: Atheist, Science, Ideas, Subtle Atheist, God Is Not Great

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

Topics: Humility, Divine, Claims, God Is Not Great

If I was told to sacrifice something to prove my devotion to God , if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said 'Yes I'll gut my kid to show my love of God.

Topics: Kids, Sacrifice, Men, Devotion To God

Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet - who was only another male mammal - is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent.

Topics: Art, Dancing, Alcohol, Human Form

To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'

Topics: Dumb, Cosmos, Why Not, Dumb Questions

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

Topics: Atheist, Religion, Atheism, Subtle Atheist, Ethnic Cleansing

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Topics: Song, Pain, Loneliness, Dissonance, Cognitive

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

Topics: Book, Writing, Doe

Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated

source: - "Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (Holier Than Thou)". TV Series, May 23, 2005.

Topics: Atheist, Believe, Animal

[Religion] attacks us in our deepest integrity - the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we would not know an evil, wicked act from a decent human act without divine permission, without divine authority or without, even worse, either the fear of a divine punishment or the hope of a divine reward. It strips us of the right to make our own determination, as all humans always have, about what is and what is not a right human action.

Topics: Determination, Integrity, Self

It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.

Topics: Thinking, Views, Political, Best Political

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.

Topics: Sick, Religion, Atheism

I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It's as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.

Topics: Travel, Book, Reading, Urges

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

Topics: Time, Faithful, Arguing

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.67, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Ideas, Atoms, Matter, Infancy Is, Subtle Atheist

Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?

Topics: Atheist, Godly, Men, Gullibility, Godly Man

There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.

Topics: Stupid, People, Lazy

Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God's on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.

Topics: Views, Your Side, People

I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

Topics: Dark, Night, Giving, Dark Night Of The Soul

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.

Topics: Book, Writing, Good Day, Dusk

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'...

Topics: Battle, Littles, Friendship Love, Literature And Music

The god of Moses would call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead.

Topics: Ideas, Suffering, Succeed, Prince Of Peace, Progeny

The most educated person in the world now has to admit-- I shall not say confess-- that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.

Topics: World, Educated, Educated Person

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.

Topics: Tactics, Impossible, Terrorism

In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask for a doggie bag.

Topics: Bags, Restaurants

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.

Topics: Mistake, Black And White, Evil, Leftists, Moral Absolutism

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

Topics: Beautiful, Choices, Pops, Difficult Choices

In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

Topics: Light, Giving, Lovely

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

Topics: Soul, Mind, Literature

The crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological.  The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state.

Topics: Believe, Differences, Political, Political Differences

Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus.

Topics: Refuge, Consensus, Security

You can only have one aim per debate.

Topics: Debate, Aim

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

Topics: Atheist, Sacrifice, Law, Inevitable Death

Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.82, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Notebook, Christian, Odds, Motels, Banging

God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

Topics: God, Men, Civilization, God Is Not Great

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

Topics: Country, Taken, Order, Law And Order

Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.

Topics: Giving, Males, Return

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

Topics: Writing, Composing, Sentences

Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way. (Closing statement of the debate with William Dembski at Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, Texas, November 18, 2010)

Topics: Thinking, Texas, Risk, Thinking Of Yourself, Greatest Atheist

Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

Topics: Adrenal Glands, Recipes, Evolution, Glands, God Is Not Great

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life.

Topics: Atheist, Children, Believe, Indochina, Contemplative

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

Topics: Atheism, Conclusion, Greatest Atheist

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

Topics: Atheist, Men, Atheism, Subtle Atheist, God Is Not Great

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

Topics: Sacrifice, Risk, Titles, Dissidents

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

Topics: Atheist, Science, Religion, Subtle Atheist

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things because to demystify supposedly 'holy text dictated by god' and show that they are man made and what you have to show [is] there internal inconsistencies and absurdities. One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority... it is an indispensable thing people can call it blasphemy if they like, but if they call it that they have to assume there is something to be blasphemed - some divine work, well I don't accept the premise.

Topics: Atheist, Men, People

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.

Topics: Bullying, Boys, Long, Schoolmates

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.

Topics: Racist, Definitions, Discrimination

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

Topics: Atheist, Real, Godly, Power Over Others, Highly Intelligent

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

Topics: People, Boredom, Tyranny, Postmodernism

Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.

Topics: People, World, Want, Reactionaries, Puke

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.

Topics: Atheist, Atheism, Christianity

My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.

Topics: Kissing, Numbers, Majority, Kiss My Ass

We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.

Topics: Religious, Lying, Writing, Mock

I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.

Topics: Children, Animal, Giving

What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.

Topics: Ideas, Lifetime, Vindicated

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

Topics: Struggle, Ironic, Mind

What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.

Topics: Inspiring, Friends, Existence

Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled...

Topics: Opposites, Merit, Virtue, Compelled

Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.

Topics: Fear, Dying, Waste

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.3, Basic Books

Topics: Lying, Independent, Thinking, Independent Thinking, Independent Thought

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.

Topics: Thinking, Sheep, Too Much, Fleece

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Topics: Philosophy, Believe, Healing, Faith Healing

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

Topics: Reading, Expression, Stuff

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

Topics: Progress, Argument, Confrontation

Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.

Topics: Rocks, Jingles, Three, Jingle Bells

I personally want to "do" death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.

Topics: Death, Eye, Looks

A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.

Topics: Laughing, Worry, Gone

Margaret Thatcher has shown that there is power and dignity to be won by defying the status quo and the majority rather than by adapting to them. If the British left, which she froze into immobility like Medusa, could bring itself to learn from this, then we might not have to look upon her like again.

Topics: Power, Majority, Medusa

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Topics: Atheist, Thinking

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

Topics: Atheist, Selfish, Stupid, Subtle Atheist

Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Topics: Logic, Forgotten, Claims

If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.

Topics: Long, Important, Principles, Zealot

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

Topics: Atheist, Stupid, Men, Anthropocentrism

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries.

Topics: Father, Son, Views

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

Topics: Henry Kissinger, Trustworthy, Accepting

Arguments that explain everything... explain nothing

Topics: Argument

In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.

Topics: Order, Mind, Wish, Whip It, Subjection

The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage.

Topics: Despair, Moments

[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.

Topics: Islamic, Mean, Thinking, American Imperialism

Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.

Topics: Atheist, Islamic, Support

The prince's official job description as king will be 'defender of the faith,' which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths—another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire.

Topics: Mother, Atheist, Kings

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.

Topics: Atheist, Religion, Buried, Matchboxes, Greatest Atheist

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

Topics: Atheist, Thinking, Long

The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.

Topics: Sin, Boring, Unforgivable, Unforgivable Sin

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

Topics: Giving Up, Believe, Religion

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

Topics: Religion, Earth, Way

In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2011). “Hitchens vs Blair”, p.10, Random House

Topics: People, Religion, Wicked, Wicked Things

A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.

Topics: Children, Lying, Believe, Leprosy

It's called faith because it's not knowledge.

The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

Topics: Religion, Half, Chimpanzees, Chromosomes

People are frightened of death, and the central lie of all religion is that there’s a cure for this and an exception we’ve made in your own case: an eternal life offered if you make the right propitiations and the right abjections. Well, I’m sorry. I think that it's the height of immorality to lie to people like that. That’s why [religion] survives.

Topics: Sorry, Lying, Thinking, Abjection, Propitiation

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.

source: - "God Is Not Great". Book by Christopher Hitchens, www.theguardian.com. 2011.

Topics: Views, Lunatic Asylums, Planets, Colony, Undesirable

I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.

source: - Source: www.wanliss.com

Topics: Thinking, Waste, Planets, No Time To Waste

Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.13, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Men, He Man, Guru, God Is Not Great

In one was, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely this reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Mortality”, p.13, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Scythes, Taunting, Reaper

Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.

Topics: Social Democracy, Rosa

Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers). How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around). What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch-22: A Memoir”, p.253, Hachette UK

Topics: Natural Gifts, Fooling Around, Reciting

A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles. The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2014). “Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports”, p.391, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Upper Class, Blackmail, Handouts

The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation, but the wrong culprit. Human sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus miracles attested to, and scapegoats - such as Jews or heretics or witches - hunted down and burned.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2007). “The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever”, p.9, Da Capo Press

Topics: Culprit, Scapegoat

The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.

Topics: Nonsensical

I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.

source: - "Christmas with Christopher Hitchens". Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. December 20, 2007.

Topics: Wacky, Garden Of Eden

The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays”, p.183, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Capricious

There is a reason for the affected profession of " anarchist sympathies" among Tories and grandees, and of " libertarian principles" by Hobbesian yahoos of the right. Among the former, one sees the upholding of the view that a gentleman's business and property are his own, and none of the government's. Among the latter, a distaste for democracy, for taxation, and for the need to consult others about the planet.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.250, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Affected

The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party was modelled in large part on admiration for European National Socialist and Fascist movements, hoped to emulate them especially in their nationalism against the West. But mutated by Saddam Hussein it became also one that very, very much admired, and grew a special moustache in admiration of the work of Yosif Vissarionovitch Dzugashvili, the great Georgian known to us historically as Stalin. So you had him in modern Iraq, a regime in our own time, that was openly, directly modelled upon the two most extreme examples of European totalitarianism.

source: - Source: www.abc.net.au

Topics: Socialist Party, Georgians, Moustache

The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for "peace through strength" has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.46, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Hypnotic, Legislative Branch, Peace Through Strength

Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth

source: - Simon Cottee, Thomas Cushman, Christopher Hitchens (2008). “Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left”, p.5064, NYU Press

Topics: Scum Of The Earth

Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.

source: - "Mommie Dearest". www.slate.com. October 20, 2003.

Topics: Ethical Questions

The obsession with gold, actually and politically, occurs among those who regard economics as a branch of morality. Gold is solid, gold is durable, gold is rare, gold is even (in certain very peculiar circumstances) convertible. To believe in thrift, solidity and soundness is to believe in some way in the properties of gold.

Topics: Solidity, Soundness

[Concerning monotheistic religions] The only thing these hysterical cults have in common is the belief that this world will be consumed, and deservedly so, when the moment is ripe. They also, all of them, profess a great disdain for earthly possessions. Yet they pass the intervening time in haggling over the most trivial and paltry property rights, over caves and rocks and disputable pieces of archeological rubbish.

Topics: Consumed, Intervening, Earthly Possessions

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

Topics: Indochina, Conspirators

The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.57, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Ineffable

When I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.307, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Antidepressants, Brand Names

When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul.

source: - Simon Cottee, Thomas Cushman, Christopher Hitchens (2008). “Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left”, p.5073, NYU Press

Topics: Jewish Life, Bat Mitzvah, Synagogue

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

source: - "Not Even a Hedgehog" by Christopher Hitchens, www.slate.com. June 7, 2004.

Topics: Counterparts

Exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn't so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside the baggy garments.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2015). “And Yet...: Essays”, p.173, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Slender, Cannonballs, Physically Fit

A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “The Trial of Henry Kissinger”, p.88, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Kissinger, Good Liar

Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.

source: - "The Case Against Henry Kissinger. Part Two. Crimes against humanity". www.thirdworldtraveler.com. March 2001.

Topics: Kissinger, Candide

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

Topics: Kissinger, Henry Kissinger

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Mortality”, p.14, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Kissinger, Henry Kissinger, Obituary, World Trade Center

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.

source: - "Christopher Hitchens on his memoir, Hitch-22". "Hugh Hewitt Show", www.hughhewitt.com. July 13, 2010.

Topics: Away From Home

All of life is a wager

Topics: Wagers

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.

source: - "Christopher Hitchens to Charlie Rose: I'd do it again" by Patrick Gavin, www.politico.com. August 16, 2010.

Topics: Wagers

I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

source: - "Anderson Cooper 360°", transcripts.cnn.com. August 5, 2010.

Topics: Wagers, Terrible Times

The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.208, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Medieval Europe, Holland, Tuscany, Religious Books

In modern Greek history, there is a close relationship between national humiliation and political radicalization.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (1984). “Cyprus”, Quartet Books Ltd

Topics: Close Relationship

But you'll notice, you will notice that Russia and China, invariably at the United Nations, move to block American action, to repress or hem in or punish other kinds of outlaw. Who stands behind Mugabi at the United Nations? Russia and China do. Who tried successfully to prevent the United Nations from speaking with one voice on its most signal violation of its resolutions, Iraq? Russia and China, again. North Korea the same. Burma the same.

source: - Source: www.npr.org

Topics: Burma

Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in the air which made one think - made me think for many years - that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.195, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Time Spent

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2013). “Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship”, p.8, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Stockholm Syndrome, Stockholm

I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge.

source: - "The Hell of War" by Christopher Hitchens, www.slate.com. June 5, 2006.

Topics: Khmer Rouge, Vietcong

So here we have found a means of a) alienating even the most flexible and patient Palestinians; while b) frustrating the efforts of the more principled and compromising Israelis; while c) empowering and financing some of the creepiest forces in American and Israeli society; and d) heaping ordure on our own secular founding documents. When will the Justice Department and the Congress and the Supreme Court become aware of this huge and rank offense, which is designed to bring us ever nearer to holy war?

source: - "Your Tax Dollars at Work - in West Bank Settlements" by Christopher Hitchens, www.slate.com. July 12, 2010.

Topics: Principled, Holy War

The Iranian people were converted to Islam not very much longer after the conquest of the Arab world by Islam, but they refused to adopt the Arabic language, and it's a great point of pride to them that Persian culture and the Persian language and Persian literature survived the conversion to Islam. And the conversion to Islam also was for most of them not the Sunni majority form, but the Shia one. So there's a great discrepancy between Iranian society and many other of what we think of as Arab Muslim States and systems.

source: - Source: www.abc.net.au

Topics: Iranian, Shia, Arabic Language, Discrepancies Between

Religion makes kind people say unkind things: "I must prove my faith, so mutilate the genitals of my children." They wouldn't do that if God didn't tell them to do so.

source: - Source: www.wanliss.com

Topics: Kind People

Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.64, Basic Books

Topics: Regression, Chanting

The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2014). “Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere”, p.104, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Pluralism, Pluralism Is

(Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.

Topics: Sinister

The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.309, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Sinister

Here is my challenge. Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first - I have been asking it for some time - awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.

source: - "An Atheist Responds" by Christopher Hitchens, www.washingtonpost.com. July 14, 2007.

Topics: Religious Faith

'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.

Topics: Wasps

He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.

Topics: Inarticulate, Unintelligent

"Objective" means that, in a confrontation with the evidence, you would be willing to change your own mind.

Topics: Willing To Change

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

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2011). “Arguably”, p.15, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Tedium, Rectitude

[Today's left] would have left us with Slobodan Milosevic in power, Bosnia ethnically cleansed, Kosovo part of Greater Serbia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Iraq the property of a psychopathic crime family. Now, I'm sorry to say, I've no patience with that leftist mentality anymore.

Topics: Kosovo, Psychopathic, Serbia

The Russians are going to be expansionist whether we [USA] provoke them to it or not. Russians keep saying that we're trying to encircle them. In what sense does the independence of Kosovo, a land-locked province, former Yugoslavia, with no common border with Russia, threaten Russia with encirclement? This is insulting. In what sense does the independence of Georgia constitute an encirclement? What we are facing, and we may as well give it its right name, is what I called it earlier, a chauvinistic, theocratic in part, xenophobic Russian imperialism.

source: - Source: www.npr.org

Topics: Kosovo

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.64, Basic Books

Topics: Abjection, Abnegation

The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism... is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes.

source: - "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism". PBS documentary, June 2005.

Topics: Communist Manifesto, Engels

As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.1619, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Sadism, Pathology

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.

source: - "Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets'". Interview with Andrew Anthony, www.theguardian.com. November 13, 2010.

Topics: Columnists, Narrow Mindedness, Essayists, Negative People, Narrow-minded

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.

source: - "Hitch-22". Book by Christopher Hitchens, www.theguardian.com. 2010.

Topics: Bootlegging, Reading Or Writing

The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.

Topics: Land Of Opportunity

The first thing I can remember I ever wanted was to go to the United States. And for reasons that are as conventional as you can imagine: I wanted to know if it was really true that it was the land of opportunity, of democracy, and individual liberty.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2017). “Christopher Hitchens: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations”, p.46, Melville House

Topics: Land Of Opportunity, Really True

I can never quite decide whether the anti-Columbus movement is merely risible or faintly sinister. It is sinister, though, because it is an ignorant celebration of stasis and backwardness, with an unpleasant tinge of self-hatred.

source: - "Minority Report". The Nation, October 19, 1992.

Topics: Stasis

The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Mortality”, p.26, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell

The transformation of part of the northern part of this continent into "America" inaugurated a nearly boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation, and thus deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto, with or without the participation of those who wish they had never been born.

source: - "Minority Report". The Nation, October 19, 1992.

Topics: Gusto, Vim

To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off

source: - Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Mortality”, p.34, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Break Off

Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest"; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.)

source: - "What Sharon Did" by Christopher Hitchens, www.slate.com. January 5, 2006.

Topics: Interest In Others

"Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age" was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age.

source: - "WAR ON TERROR: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS on why peace-lovers must welcome this war". Christopher Hitchens, The Mirror, November 15, 2001.

Topics: Stone Age, Bombing

At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.

Topics: Tutorial

Haven't we all heard some irritating person saying that if so-and-so is elected, then he/she is absolutely definitely leaving the country? There must be some reason why it is mainly liberals who tend to say this, but the chief thing to note about the promise is that it is usually an empty one.

Topics: Leaving The Country