2916 remarks from Christopher Hitchens, 1969–2011. Polemicist, journalist, essayist. A man who held that the examined life was the only one worth living, and who examined everything.
tags: christopher-hitchens, religion, politics, atheism, war, journalism, britain, contrarianism
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author
Christopher Hitchens
filed
Thursday, December 15, 2011
revised
April 29, 2026
words
1,184
reading
~6 min
CONTRIBUTORS · ANNALS№ IEST. MMV - DACHVARD
- VANITY FAIR · THE ATLANTIC · SLATE -
Christopher Hitchens
1949 - 2011
“I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for information.”
BornPortsmouth, England · son of a Royal Navy officer · emigrated to the United States, 1981
Read atBalliol College, Oxford · PPE, 1970
Filed forThe Nation · Vanity Fair · The Atlantic · Slate · Harper’s · The New York Review of Books
PositionAnti-totalitarian, anti-clerical, pro-internationalist. Trotskyist Left → Iraq War supporter; consistent only in opposition to authority.
TargetsMother Teresa · Bill Clinton · Henry Kissinger · God · the Royal family · Noam Chomsky
SelectedThe Missionary Position (1995) ·The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001) ·Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) ·Why Orwell Matters (2002) ·God Is Not Great (2007) ·Hitch-22 (2010) ·Mortality (2012, posth.)
FILED · DECEMBER MMXI
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THE QUOTABLE HITCHENS · DISPATCHES
Christopher Hitchens
2916 remarks · 1969–2011 · arrow-keys to turn pages
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“I have always been convinced that the term ‘unborn child’ is a genuine description of material reality. Obviously, the fetus is alive, so that disputation about whether or not it counts as ‘a life’ is casuistry. The same applies, from a materialist point of view, to the question of whether or not this ‘life’ is ‘human.’ What other kind could it be? As for ‘dependent,’ this has never struck me as a very radical criticism of any agglomeration of human cells in whatever state. Children are ‘dependent’ too.”
- Christopher Hitchens
“Minority Report,” Nation, 4/24/89
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Christopher Hitchens wrote for a living from the late 1960s until he died of esophageal cancer in December 2011. In that time he produced roughly thirty books and an uncountable quantity of essays, reviews, columns, and polemics. He was reliably wrong about some things and reliably penetrating about others, and the two categories did not always map onto what his admirers and enemies expected.
He was born in Portsmouth in 1949, the son of a Royal Navy officer. He went up to Balliol in 1967, joined the International Socialists, and was, by his own later account, a Trotskyist for most of his twenties. He moved to the United States in 1981 and stayed. By the late 1990s he had broken with most of the people he had spent the previous twenty years writing alongside - over Bill Clinton, over the Catholic Church's defenders of Mother Teresa, over the proper response to the Balkans and to Saddam Hussein. The break with the left over Iraq in 2003 was the loudest, but it was not the first.
What survived through every realignment was a single instinct: never on the side of authority. The targets changed; the suspicion of anyone who claimed the right to tell other people what to think did not. Religious authority, political authority, dynastic authority, the soft authority of received opinion - all of them got the same treatment. Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) is the closest thing he wrote to a manifesto. It does not advise its reader to disagree with the consensus on every question; it advises noticing when there is a consensus and asking how it got there.
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The Style
Hitchens was the last journalist in English for whom prose was a primary instrument rather than a secondary one. He could write a column on a deadline that read like an essay. He read incessantly - the books, the reviews of the books, the people the books were attacking - and the reading shows up in the prose as a kind of layered density. Almost every sentence is doing more than one thing at once: making the local point, scoring against an absent opponent, citing a half-remembered allusion, performing a small act of literary connoisseurship. The texture is the argument.
The style does not survive into the writers who imitated it. Most of them keep the contempt and lose the reading. What Hitchens had that they did not is the very large library, accumulated by someone who had spent his whole life acting as if it would not occur to him to read anything else.
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The Inventory
The remarks below are arranged alphabetically by subject - from Alcohol to Zionism, as Windsor Mann's anthology puts it - which means they can be read as a kind of encyclopedia of opinions rather than a narrative of a life. Hitchens had an opinion about everything. More usefully, he had a way of stating it that made the reader feel the thing had been said for the first time.