Life & Wisdom Quote by Christopher Hitchens

The line lands with that very Hitchens blend of swagger and self-indictment: a toast raised with the same hand that’s been throwing punches all night. “Quite a decent constitution” reads like mock-clinical understatement, then he immediately undercuts it with “in spite of all my abuse of it,” a confession delivered as a quip. The joke isn’t just that he’s lived hard; it’s that he’s insisting on narrating the hard living as evidence of vigor rather than warning.

Intent matters here because Hitchens’s public persona was built on defiance: against pieties, against sentimentality, against the idea that the body should be managed like a moral ledger. He’s performing a kind of anti-wellness ethic, where robustness is proven by disregard. The subtext is bravado edged with a knowing wink: he recognizes the bargain he’s been making with his liver and lungs, but refuses to let prudence have the last word.

Context sharpens the irony. Hitchens was famous for drinking, smoking, and treating self-care like a bourgeois superstition, all while projecting an almost athletic confidence in his intellect and stamina. Coming from a writer who would later face esophageal cancer, the line reads as both characteristically funny and quietly tragic: an assertion of control at the exact point where control is most fragile. It “works” because it’s a compact thesis of the Hitchens mythos - the body as collateral for a life lived at full volume, and the refusal to apologize for the cost.