438 Inspiring Quotes by Christopher Hitchens

You can't have occupation and human rights.

Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries .

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice.

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

It Obama's Nobel peace prize would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.

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

Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.

I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.

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.

In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

I think that people's sexual preferences are a legitimate subject for humour, dirty humour if at all possible.

The finest fury is the most controlled.

Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don't respect them for anything but their honesty.

It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.

Friends call me Hitch. Maybe it can be turned into a 900-phone number. People would pay to talk to me.

Orwell's very ordinariness is the sterling guarantee that we need no saintly representative consciences. We would do better to make sterner use of our own.

The deficit, then, is not the difference between what America spends and what America earns; it is, to a striking extent, the difference between what the rich owe and what the rich pay.

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.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

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.

When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best--which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.

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.

The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.

Cheap booze is a false economy.

It's a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has God in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride.

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

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.

Even if the U.S. doesn't attack Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion.

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

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.

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

I'm a member of no party. I have no ideology. I'm a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that's all around us.

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.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

I worked out early on to give up things I couldn't do well at all.

One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.

Those who are determined to be ‘offended' will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

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

Very often, people embarking on such guesswork make the vulgar assumption that the lower the motives, the more likely they are to be authentic.

The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone.

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

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.

I'm very happy by myself -- I'm lucky in that way -- if I've got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.

People say, "What's it like to be a minority of one, or a kick-bag for the Internet?" It washes off me like jizz off a porn star's face.

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.

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.

Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.

The creation story is ridiculous garbage. And has given us a completely false picture of our origin as a species and the origins of the cosmos. If you want a good mythical story it would be the life of Socrates.

Littera scripta manet -- 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language -- always the language -- was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.

We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.

Revolution from above, in some states and cases, is ... often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.

Religion attacks us in our deepest integrity by saying we wouldn't be able to make a moral decision without it.

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

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

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.

A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it's employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.

Those who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

The faithful believe that certain truths have been 'revealed.' The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.

Unlike other countries, it was founded on written proclamations. America is an ideal as well as a republic. Its documents are open to revisions. They're works in progress. There's an invitation to participate.

Exceptional claims, require exceptional evidence.

There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn't be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.

The problem with open-mindedness is that it can become empty-mindedness.

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.

There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.

I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

I'm not a sheep.

I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example.

Charity... is a form of condescension.

He is in many ways quite a right-wing isolationist. It's because some people are naïve enough to confuse this with anti-imperialism that they think of him as being rather more to the left than he really is.

Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

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.

There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.

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

In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.

I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.

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

There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.

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.

And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.

I think the cultural task is to separate our impulses and needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.

It's like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world.

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

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.

Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.

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.

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.'

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.

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.'

But everybody agrees, somewhere in his heart, that there ought to be some connection between what you believe and how you behave, what you advocate for others and how you live yourself.

My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it 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.

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.

You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' -- it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

Redemption is promised at the low price of surrender of your critical faculties.

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.

Populists (and 'national socialists') look at the supposedly secret deals that run the world 'behind the scenes.' Child's play. Except that childishness is sinister in adults.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.

Orwell was interested above all not in the rationalizations of the dominant, but in the excuses and whimperings of the submissive.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.

Your favorite occupation? Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.

I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.

I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.

We know that our life is essentially tragic. I'm absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, "Why didn't you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind.

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

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

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

There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.

I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.

To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.

We have millions and millions of North Korean children totally stunted in mind and body and will have to be dealt with at some point, who have been raised to believe that they live in a regime that is run by a god.

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

Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.

There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.

Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.

The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on ‘our side.' Is it?

In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people's possessions or fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have positive consequences.

The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.

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.

I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.

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

The unspoken agreement to concede the black community to the sway of the pulpit is itself a form of racist condescension.

Hero­ism breaks its heart, and ide­al­ism its back, on the intran­si­gence of the cred­u­lous and the mediocre, manip­u­lated by the cyn­i­cal and the corrupt.

One ought not to quarrel with the aim of impartiality. It is just that, as an objective, it is harder to attain than its advocates imagine.

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.

How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.

For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.

Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.

There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Never forget that the Muslim fundamentalists are not against ‘empire.' They fight proudly for the restoration of their own lost caliphate.

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.

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.

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

Any critique of realism must begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace.

The ‘environment' is not the gift of entrepreneurs, risk takers, or investors. It is the common, inherited property of humanity.

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed--in view of the overall shortage of time--by patience.

For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.

Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

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

And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies--racism, leader worship, superstition--assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists).

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

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.

Don't write in to ask whether I would prefer Gingrich to Clinton. Ask, rather, whether Clinton prefers Gingrich to you. Go triangulate yourself.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I'm in a small way quite proud of some of it -- I only wish I'd done more.

The great fallacy at the heart of today's political correctitude--that in order to secure something vaguely termed ‘diversity' it insists on something definitely recognizable as conformity.

We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.

Chemotherapy isn't good for you.

He was so much the picture of different kinds of assimilation that it was almost a case of multiple personalities.

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

I'm terrified of losing my voice.

For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.

Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

When you consider how many millions of workdays begin with hangovers great and small, it is mildly ­surprising to find how few real descriptions of the experience our literature can boast.

All of life is a wager.

To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?

Doubt, skepticism, innovation, and inquiry are the only means by which wonder, beauty, awe, and symmetry will be discovered.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

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.

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!

A Great voice has fallen silent. A great heart has stopped.

A high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

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.

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

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.

As is so often the case with pieces that appear in the 'Onion,' I honestly could not decide whether this was a clever hoax or not -- the arguments were almost exactly as stupid as the real thing.

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

Would you have wished more, or fewer, anarchists around in the Thousand Year Reich or any of the other fantasies of hierarchy?

When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.

I'm not a conservative of any kind.

I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.

Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.

I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

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

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

I don't consider myself to be that credulous.

A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.

Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

Of course, I do everything for money.

Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.

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.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself.

One of my first reservations about Zionism was and is that, semiconsciously at least, it grants the anti-Semite's first premise about the abnormality of the Jew.

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.

The empire on which the sun never set was also the empire on which the gore never dried.

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

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

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

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

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.

I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not put together like the other chaps.

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.

What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.

So this is the way we live now: conditioned by the awareness that no North Korean provocation, however egregious, can be confronted, lest it furnish the occasion or pretext for something truly barbarous and insane.

Obscenity comes from grime.

I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

The few heroic sluts on this great working-girl turf.

By the way, if you knew how you sounded when you hissed, you wouldn't do it: you sound like such berks when you do that.

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

In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them.

Jesus is Santa Claus for Adults.

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

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.

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

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.

The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.

If you can talk, you can write.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.

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

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

It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.

My political life has been informed by the view that if there was any truth to religion there wouldn't really be any need for politics.

It's normally agreed that the question 'How are you?' doesn't put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer.

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.

Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him.

Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

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

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.

Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.

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.

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

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

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.

One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.

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.

Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.

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.

The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.

I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator -- that's beyond my conceit.

What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.

Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.

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.

Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.

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.

Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.

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

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

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

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

What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do.

I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

I'm crepuscular.

I vote and I do jury duty.

Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.

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

As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.