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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Of course, I do everything for money.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.”

“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'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.”

“Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.”

“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.”

“I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.”

“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.”

“Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.”

“My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.”

“A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.”

“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.”