Christopher Hitchens

One test of un homme sérieux is that it is possible to learn from him even when one radically disagrees with him.

But it can be almost as objectionable to be made to take part in something as to be forbidden to do so.

Patriotic and tribal feelings belong to the squalling childhood of the human race, and become no more charming in their senescence. They are particularly unattractive when evinced by a superpower.

I once heard Susan Sontag, in conversation with Umberto Eco, define the polymath as one “who is interested in everything, and in nothing else.”

Friends, we represent a minority, but Literature is on our side. With so many fine books to be read, so much to be studied and known, there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish.

In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism does not heal it; it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy.

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.

Did you appreciate that each column of the Parthenon makes a very slight inward incline, so that if projected upward into space they would eventually steeple themselves together at a symmetrical point in the empyrean? The “rightness” is located somewhere between the beauty of science and the science of beauty.

Compulsory bad taste isn’t a good cultural sign either.

He could see events being mutated into propaganda before his very eyes, even in the information headquarters of an ostensible democracy.

And, permanently tempted though he was by cynicism and despair, Orwell also believed in the latent possession of these faculties by those we sometimes have the nerve to call “ordinary people.” Here, then, is some of the unpromising bedrock—hardscrabble soil in Scotland, gritty coal mines in Yorkshire, desert landscapes in Africa, soulless slums and bureaucratic offices—combined with the richer soil and loam of ever-renewing nature, and that tiny, irreducible core of the human personality that somehow manages to put up a resistance to deceit and coercion. Out of the endless attrition between them can come such hope as we may reasonably claim to possess.

I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.