Christopher Hitchens Quotes - Page 5

Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu - actually of the prices not the courses - outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember).

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here - humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed - but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

The finest fury is the most controlled.

The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?

I defend Salman Rushdie because it a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression

Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.

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

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

Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faintly sinister - that redolence of moral blackmail that adheres to certain charitable appeals and certain kinds of politician. (Not for nothing is baby-kissing the synonym for public insincerity.)

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

The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima' - the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd.

The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: “anima” - the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.

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

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

You have to choose your future regrets.

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.

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

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.

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.