Christopher Hitchens on Life

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

"My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends."

"The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobsters, anal sex and picnics."

"In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist."

"Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion."

"Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities."

"I ask myself why do these worshipers of this God want to convict him of being such a crummy designer - most of his creations die off, the rest suffer miserably; of being cruel and capricious and bungling and incompetent and callous as a father?"

"I say I'm an anti-theist because I think it would be rather awful if it was true. If there was a permanent, total, around-the-clock, divine supervision...an invigilation of everything you did...you would never have a waking or sleeping moment where you weren't being watched and controlled and supervised by some celestial entity, from the moment of conception til...well not even to your death, because it's only after death that the real fun begins, isn't it? It would be like living in North Korea."

"In my country of birth the great new fictional practitioners have in their front rank names like Rushdie, Ishiguro, Kureishi, Mo. This attainment on their part makes me oddly proud to be whatever I am, and convinces me that internationalism is the highest form of patriotism."

"It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque."

"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."

"Because the man with many monikers in many ways embodies his country and because this election cycle is now so absurd, and so much up for grabs, it is unwise to exclude anything... The best guess has to be that here's a man who hates to be alone, who needs approval and reinforcement, who talks a better game than he plays, who is crude, hyperactive, emotional and optimistic."

"Is this an argument for abolition? Of course it is. But not for an abolition by fiat: for yet another political change that would come as a surprise to the passively governed. It is an invitation to think - are you serious when you say that you cannot imagine life without it? Do you prefer invented tradition, sanitised history, prettified literature, state-sponsored superstition and media-dominated pulses of cheering and jeering?"

"In their last ditch, the royalists object that this all too bloodless and practical; that people need and want the element of magic and fantasy. Nobody wants life to be charmless. But the element of fantasy and magic is as primitive as it is authentic, and there are good reasons why it should not come from the state. When orchestrated and distributed in that way, it leads to disappointment and rancour, and can lead to the enthronement of sillier or nastier idols."

"I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view….I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost."

"I don't see how you can be saying this. Look. You want to take...you want your god to take responsibility for the huge number of collapsing stars and imploding galaxies and destroyed universes and failed solar systems that have left us in this tiny corner on the one planet in this petty solar system that can support life some of the time on some of its surface. And you want a creator who filled this earth with species, since life began 99% of which are now extinct already...and this is some design, isn't it?"

"What preoccupies most scientists now is not how much they know compared to 50 years ago, though that is enormous as a difference, but how little they know compared to what they're finding out For a few milliseconds really of cosmic time our species has lived on one very very small rock, in a very small solar system that's a part of a fantastically unimportant suburb, in one of an uncountable number of galaxies Every single second since the big bang a star the size of our sun has blown up, gone to nothing And indeed physicists now exist who can tell you the date on which our sun will follow suit We know when it's coming to an end and we know how it will be, but we know something even more extraordinary which is the rate of expansion of this explosion we're looming through is actually speeding up. Our universe is flying apart further and faster than we thought it was Everyone who studies it professionally finds it impossible to reconcile this extraordinarily destructive, chaotic, self-destructive process, to find in it the finger of god, to find in that the idea of a design. And it's not just because we know so little about it, it's because what we know about it that's essential doesn't seem as if it's the intended result brought about by a divine-benign creator who loves every single one of us living as we do on this tiny rock in this negligible suburb of the cosmos."

"There's no such word, though there should be, as "adeism" or as being an "adeist", but if there was one I would say that's what I was. I don't believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death. If there was such a force, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn't prove that this entity cared about us; answered prayers; cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all; cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means; cared what we ate or on what day; cared whether we lived or died. There's no reason at all why this entity isn't completely indifferent to us. You cannot get from deism to theism - except by a series of extraordinarily generous assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation; to redemption; to salvation; or to suspensions of the natural order."

"When Socrates was sentenced to death, for his philosophical investigations and his blasphemy for challenging the Gods of the city and he accepted his death. He did say "well, if we're lucky perhaps I'll be able to hold a conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too", in other words that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble and what is pure and what is true can always go on. Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that is the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don't know, but I do know that it is the conversation I want to have while I am still alive. Which means that for me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet. That I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way. And I urge you to look at those of you that tell you that that you are dead until you believe as they do. And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don't think of that as a gift, think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside no matter how tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way."

"If this was the plan - was it made by someone who likes us? And if so, why have 99.9% of all the other species that have ever been created already died out? And part of what plan was that?; If it is a plan or a design, the planner must be either very capricious - really toying with his creation; and/or very clumsy, very tinkering and fantastically wasteful - throw away 99.9% of what you've made; or very cruel and very callous; or just perhaps very indifferent; or some combination of all the above. And so it's no good saying that He moves in mysterious ways, or that He has purposes that are opaque to us, because even that kind of evasion has to make itself predicate on the assumption that the person saying this knows more than I do about the supernatural, and I haven't yet met anyone who does have a private line to the creator, of the sort that would be required even to speculate about it. In other words, I haven't met anyone, in holy orders or out of it, who isn't also a primate. And neither have you."