Christopher Hitchens Quotes

I'll also tell you that five hundred thousand people will die this year of cancer. And I'll also tell you that one in every four will be afflicted with this disease, and yet, somehow, we seem to have put it in a little bit of the background.

Despite the fact that one in every two men and one in every three women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, no one ever expects it to happen to them. I surely didn't. I was an otherwise healthy 37-year-old when I was diagnosed in 1996 with multiple myeloma, the same rare cancer Tom Brokaw has.

I'd like to prove to other people that it's not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer.

Incredibly, nearly 70,000 Young Adults between 15-39 are diagnosed with cancer each year. 10,000 will not survive. This is a very important stat for me, because I fall in this category. I am one of these statistics. Unlike every other age group, there has been no improvement in the 5-year survival of young adults in 30 years. That means many young adults have the same chance of getting cancer and dying from it as they did in the 1970's. This is not OK.

People refer to 'the good ol' days', but I don't know what they're talking about. As someone who's battled cancer, if I lived more than 20 years ago, I'd be a dead man.

I was told 50 percent of the population gets cancer. Everybody is going to be affected.

More than 10 million Americans are living with cancer, and they demonstrate the ever-increasing possibility of living beyond cancer.

I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it's a certainty you'll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it's an awful process.

When I was diagnosed I didn't know how epidemic cancer was. You find out that everybody you know is touched by this disease.

I know so many people who have battled breast cancer and they didn't all make it.

For example, colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Every four minutes someone is diagnosed, and every nine minutes someone dies.

Hodgkin's is serious and I don't want to be dismissive about it, but there are people who have gone through much worse and lost their lives to cancer.

Cancer is the ultimate nemesis that hangs in the balance for one in three women and one in two men in their lifetime.

Cancer has been unfortunately in my life. My mom's best friend is kicking ass in her battle with breast cancer. Both of my grandmas had cancer. I recently lost a friend to cancer.

Early detection [of prostate cancer] saved my life.

It's a cruel reality. But after a week, very few people survive.

Very few people around the world know that cancer kills more people than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined - until we get everyone to realize that, it will be tough to get them to act.

I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.

If you're not flying people around on wires, and you're only allowing them to do things that people can really do, it can't go on for very long, because eventually somebody gets the drop on the other person and then it's over.

There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

Cancer is a word, not a sentence.

To be honest, I didn't think I would be here for this album [Give the People What They Want]. I thought I was going to die. When the doctor came in by himself and told me I had cancer, it was frightening. He told me he got it and there would be six months of chemo. I really thought people would be promoting my record without me here to enjoy it. But I'm here.

People should be afraid of the cancer, not the mammogram.

I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn't let it kill me before it kills me.

You know, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997 I realized I had spent too long arranging my attitude.