The term "hitch-slap" has been used as an informal term among his supporters for a carefully crafted remark designed to humiliate his opponents.

Hitchens was a strong critic of religion and a proponent of atheism.

Marxism and socialism In a 2001 interview with Reason, Hitchens said he became a Marxist and a Trotskyist in his teens, beliefs that further developed during his time at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1966, he was demonstrating in Trafalgar Square against the Vietnam War.

And then his last words. As he lay dying, he asked for a pen and paper and tried to write on it. After a while, he finished, held it up, looked at it and saw that it was an illegible assemblage of scribbled, meaningless hieroglyphics. “What's the use?” he said to Steve Wasserman.