Christopher Hitchens Quotes

My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.

War zones are dangerous, protests can be violent, also, natural disasters are difficult to cover, so there are going to be risks.

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.

During the first million years of its existence, mankind survived five apocalypses without succumbing to extinction. It endured the Apocalypse of Steel, the Apocalypse of Hydrogen, the Apocalypse of Serotonin, and both Apocalypses of Water, the second of which occurred despite certain contracts to the contrary.

I was a rust repairer. I was a rust repairer and full-time survivor. I survived all the major earthquakes, and the Titanic, and several air crash.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

Superstition is the poison of the mind.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

I think religion has caused so much catastrophe in the world.

Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net. When disaster strikes - the economy gets blown, people lose a job, floods, war, conflict, bad governance, all of those things - there is nothing to fall back on.

Government at every level failed the Katrina victims.

What superstition and fanaticism on every side!

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days…. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

As a war must have generals, so must a plague.

Get the hell off the beach!

It’s bullshit. When people are dying, bureaucracy should be thrown out. I saw a guy kill himself at the Superdome. Two policemen have committed suicide.

I don’t do apocalypse!

Reform comes in the wake of disaster.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

For me, tribalism and religion are basically the big reasons we're in trouble. Patriotism, tribalism, and religion.

George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.

The physical and emotional qualifications to survive an apocalypse are naturally equalizing.

We imagine 'the end' as a world-devastating event, but every time there's a terrible earthquake, a tsunami, an outbreak of disease - that's apocalyptic, on a micro-scale.

I've had this theory for a while, but I think there needs to be a message with the end of 'Game of Thrones.' You know? I think what needs to happen is ice and fire are going to go to war, a huge war between those two factions, and I think, in that war, they will destroy themselves. There will be complete chaos, complete destruction.

The species will continue, whatever apocalypse we manage to unleash. It just won't be much fun to live through.