137 quotes
To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.
For all I know it does, it may, but that does not recommend it, to me, nor does it prove anything of its theology.
In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
Mortality (2012)
If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka.
Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
If a great city or a great state should fall as the result of an apparent "accident", the there would be a general reason why it required only an accident to make it fall.
For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)
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.
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.
For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)
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 (Michael Moore) who actually embodies all of those qualities.
The conservative aptitude for stressing the "individual responsibility" of all parties except themselves.
For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)
What is it like to lie to children and tell them that they have an authority, that they must love and be terrified of it at the same time. What's that like? I want to know.
This small book is part of a big career devoted to pulverizing cant, deflating oppression, and maximizing human liberty. Not a day went by that Hitch didn’t enter the lists against some iniquity.
The Missionary Position, Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice (2012)
If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.
The Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of gold and got her with child.
Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
You give me the awful impression, I hate to have say it, of someone who hasn't read any of the arguments against your position ever.
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.
It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one.
It’s a very vulgar, arithmetical, pragmatic way of arguing anyway. If you do that, then get the facts and figures wrong, well then you’re really fucked. You’re fucked twice.
But gallows humor is inseparable from dentistry: at one point I heard the good doctor say, as he plowed through the layers of plaque and tartar, “Good news. I’ve found some of your teeth.”
And Yet...: Essays (2015)