Christopher Hitchens

"I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little."

"Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be."

"'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age."

"I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death."

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

"I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise."

"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."

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

"Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy."

"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 amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation."

"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."

"There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise."

"To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid."

"Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake."