If you’re looking for Christopher Hitchens quotes about death, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people. And in this article we share a list of the 21 most interesting quotes about death by Christopher Hitchens. Let’s get inspired!
Christopher Hitchens quotes about death
What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
— Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
— Christopher Hitchens
th. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there’s nothing to be afraid of, I won’t know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn’t something to be afraid of, it’s something to be terrified of.
— Christopher Hitchens
I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression ‘killing time.’ It’s a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
— Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.
— Christopher Hitchens
At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn’t too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.
— Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine—some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone—but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him.
— Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Of course what I’m about to share isn’t true for me but…Friends, somebody said, are “god’s apology for relations.” (p. 129)
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one’s own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says ‘you’re next.’ Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
It’s like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a ‘first generation’ of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.
— Christopher Hitchens
It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or ‘objectify’ them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like ‘Stalinism, ‘ say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden’s writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy
It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.
— Christopher Hitchens
The finest fury is the most controlled.
— Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated
— Christopher Hitchens
Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other ‘races’ according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy
Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have ‘ever been threatened’ by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can’t think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.
— Christopher Hitchens
At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. ‘We once met many years ago, ‘ he said. ‘And you knew and befriended my father.’ My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. ‘My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argen
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish