3 December 2020 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 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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens 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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens 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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens 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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens 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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens 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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens ‘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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens It’s surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens I don’t think consensus-building politics is what I’m meant to be doing.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens 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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens 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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.’
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Christopher Hitchens I don’t envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.
