Christopher Hitchens Quotes

“I can see why people find him [Hugo Chávez] charming. He's very ebullient, as they say. I've heard him make a speech, though, and he has a vice that's always very well worth noticing because it's always a bad sign: he doesn't know when to sit down. He's worse than Castro was. He won't shut up. Then he told me that he didn't think the United States landed on the moon and didn't believe in the existence of Osama bin Laden. He thought all of this was all a put-up job. He's a wacko.”

“I can see why people find him [Hugo Chávez] charming. He's very ebullient, as they say. I've heard him make a speech, though, and he has a vice that's always very well worth noticing because it's always a bad sign: he doesn't know when to sit down. He's worse than Castro was. He won't shut up. Then he told me that he didn't think the United States landed on the moon and didn't believe in the existence of Osama bin Laden. He thought all of this was all a put-up job. He's a wacko.”

“I should like to be remembered as the man who raised a voice against... placing limitations on the freedom of the individual.”

“When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines the kind of men we are.”

“We must be aware of consumerism! That's our tendency. It's the capitalistic curse that we were poisoned with. We should spend only what is necessary. How do you call the big cars, the latest ones? Hummer! Not a single dollar to import Hummers! What is that? What is that? What kind of revolution is this? One of Hummers? No way!”

“We learned many years ago that the rich may have money, but the poor have time.”

“It makes one sad to see the sell-out of President Fox; really, it makes one sad. How sad that the president of a people like the Mexicans lets himself become the puppy dog of the empire.”

“I will be very sad and worried if the imperialist government was calling me a great democratic man.”

“I neglected my health, and I was reluctant to have medical check-ups. It was a fundamental mistake for a revolutionary, to the Venezuelan people and the international public opinion.”

“Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.”

“The end of all knowledge should be service to others.”