Christopher Hitchens Biography Quotes 32 Report mistakes

Early Life and Identity
Christopher Hitchens was born in 1949 in England and became one of the late 20th and early 21st century's most recognizable essayists and polemicists. He came of age in a postwar Britain that was renegotiating its place in the world, and the questions of authority, empire, and morality that marked that era never left his work. From an early stage he gravitated toward books, debate, and the public square. Though firmly British in accent and temperament, he later made a second home in the United States, ultimately becoming a naturalized American citizen. That dual identity, British-born and American by choice, shaped the cosmopolitan reach of his journalism and the tone of his critiques.

Student Politics and Early Journalism
Hitchens studied at Oxford, where he plunged into student politics and left-wing activism. The atmosphere of argument and contrarian inquiry suited him. In those years he embraced a socialism that was internationalist in outlook and suspicious of authoritarianism. He learned to make a case in print and at the lectern, disciplines he would practice for the rest of his life. His earliest professional years were spent in the British magazine world, where he established himself as a sharp political reporter and a lively literary critic. He wrote with equal energy about Westminster infighting, foreign revolutions, and poetry, honing a style that fused moral urgency with wit.

Transatlantic Career
In the 1980s Hitchens moved to the United States and deepened his transatlantic profile. He became known to American readers through his essays and columns, including a long-running column for The Nation, where he filed a "Minority Report" that often challenged conventional left opinion. He later became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, wrote for Slate, and published widely in other journals. His pieces were reported from the field and argued from first principles, and he cultivated a voice that blended anecdote, history, and invective. He carried that voice onto lecture stages and television studios, where he relished open debate.

Books and Literary Affinities
Hitchens authored and edited a shelf of books that ranged from literary portraits to political indictments. He wrote about George Orwell with special admiration, arguing for Orwell's enduring example of intellectual honesty. The Trial of Henry Kissinger accused a powerful statesman of grave crimes and demanded accountability. The Missionary Position scrutinized the reputation of Mother Teresa and challenged the morality of celebrated charity that tolerated suffering. No One Left to Lie To took aim at the culture and politics around Bill Clinton. Later collections such as Love, Poverty and War and Arguably gathered his essays into capacious volumes that revealed the range of his interests, from poetry and fiction to war and diplomacy. He edited The Portable Atheist, presenting a long tradition of skeptical thought, and late in life published a memoir, Hitch-22, a work of reminiscence and self-portraiture.

Friends, Adversaries, and Public Life
Hitchens was a literary man as much as a political one, and his friendships reflected that. He was close to novelists Martin Amis and Ian McEwan and stood publicly with Salman Rushdie during the years after a death sentence was issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. His circle also included essayists and public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag. He argued for solidarity with dissidents and writers under threat, insisting that free expression was a nonnegotiable principle. He could be a generous advocate and a ferocious adversary, often in the same week. He debated Edward Said and Noam Chomsky on questions of empire and terrorism, and he maintained a spirited, sometimes bitter, public disagreement with his brother, the journalist Peter Hitchens, over politics, religion, and foreign policy.

Political Evolution and Controversy
Hitchens's political trajectory startled many of his longtime readers. Though he never abandoned his anti-authoritarian instincts, he became convinced that militant theocracy and dictatorship were mortal enemies of liberal society. In the 1990s he supported intervention in the Balkans against ethnic cleansing, and after the attacks of September 2001 he argued that secular democracies had an obligation to confront jihadist movements and their state patrons. He supported the U.S.-led war in Iraq, a stance that broke his fellowship with many on the left and led to searing exchanges in print and on stage, including clashes with George Galloway and former colleagues at The Nation. Hitchens framed his position as a continuation of an anti-totalitarian ethic, even as opponents saw it as a capitulation to imperial politics. That disagreement became a defining feature of his public life and a test of his claim that principles should outlast party.

Religion and the New Atheism
Alongside his political writing, Hitchens became one of the most prominent critics of religion in his era. His book God Is Not Great argued that religion "poisons everything", charging that faith, when authoritative, suppresses inquiry and abets cruelty. He appeared frequently with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, a quartet often labeled the "New Atheists", and debated clergy, philosophers, and politicians, including a widely watched exchange with Tony Blair about whether religion is a force for good. Hitchens's case against religion was not merely doctrinal; it was historical and literary, pulling from his reading and travels to make a brief against supernatural claims and clerical power.

Style and Method
Hitchens prized language and took pains with his sentences. He believed that style was not decorative but diagnostic: if a claim could not be stated clearly and forcefully, it probably could not be defended. He cultivated the essay as an instrument of skepticism and engagement, drawing on classical references, jokes, and reported detail to drive arguments home. He distrusted cant and euphemism, and he preferred the plain naming of things, whether describing the crimes of a dictator or the virtues of a poet. This commitment to language made him, for admirers and detractors alike, impossible to ignore.

Personal Life
Hitchens's personal life intersected with his work but was not reducible to it. He married more than once and had children, and he described his domestic affections with warmth when he chose to. He later married the writer Carol Blue, and friends often noted the steadiness of that companionship amid a schedule of travel, deadlines, and public combat. He valued conversation and hospitality, and many of his most memorable insights were forged in salons, bars, and late-night kitchens as much as in libraries.

Illness, Writing on Mortality, and Death
In 2010 Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, an illness he discussed with unsparing candor in a series of essays for Vanity Fair. He refused consolation that appealed to providence and insisted on describing his condition as it was, coining, in one essay, "the land beyond the sickroom" to evoke a world narrowed by treatment and pain but not emptied of thought. Those pieces were later collected as Mortality. He continued to speak, debate, and write while undergoing treatment, extending his public examination of death, belief, and courage. He died in 2011 in Houston, Texas, of complications from the disease.

Legacy
Christopher Hitchens left behind a body of work that remains in active circulation: books that test reputations, essays that puncture falsehood, and debates that model the clash of ideas without the pretense of consensus. He is remembered for his unwavering defense of free expression and for a contrarian conscience that answered to argument more than to tribe. His literary friendships with figures like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan, and his public dialogues with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, locate him within a culture of letters that believed in the power of the spoken and written word. To his critics he exemplified a brilliant but wayward radical; to his admirers he exemplified courage, what he called solidarity with the wretched of the earth, and a determination to look reality in the face. Even those who rejected his conclusions often engaged his sentences, which was, for Hitchens, the final measure of a writer's life.

Our collection contains 32 quotes who is written by Christopher, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Writing - Live in the Moment - Free Will & Fate.