Top 100 Christopher Hitchens Quotes
#2. It's only when you have grazed on the lower slopes of your own ignorance and begun to understand the great vistas of nonknowledge that you have, that you can claim to have been educated at all.
Christopher Hitchens
#4. When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early.
Christopher Hitchens
#5. The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.
Christopher Hitchens
#6. [Today's left] would have left us with Slobodan Milosevic in power, Bosnia ethnically cleansed, Kosovo part of Greater Serbia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Iraq the property of a psychopathic crime family. Now, I'm sorry to say, I've no patience with that leftist mentality anymore.
Christopher Hitchens
#7. Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.
Christopher Hitchens
#8. The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.
Christopher Hitchens
#9. Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.
Christopher Hitchens
#10. How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
Christopher Hitchens
#11. Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power.
Christopher Hitchens
#12. You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
Christopher Hitchens
#14. Divine permission, given to people who think they have god on their side, enables actions that a morally normal unbeliever would not contemplate.
Christopher Hitchens
#15. I'm reminded of the lady governor of Texas who, during a controversy about bilingualism in the State House in Austin, said if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it was plenty good enough for her.
Christopher Hitchens
#17. It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.)
Christopher Hitchens
#19. One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has.
Christopher Hitchens
#20. The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage.
Christopher Hitchens
#21. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.
Christopher Hitchens
#22. Every day one reads meretricious babble about 'globalization' and the abolition of frontiers, most of it amounting to little more than celebration of the worldwide availability of Wheel of Fortune.
Christopher Hitchens
#23. Anyone whose major concern is the sanctity of human life is in effect, by leaving population growth unchecked, ensuring death by famine. Nature is pitiless, and if humans will not themselves limit population then they will have it done for them.
Christopher Hitchens
#24. I think that all filth is local ... and that a joke isn't a joke unless it's at somebody's expense
Christopher Hitchens
#25. A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles. The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth.
Christopher Hitchens
#26. I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.
Christopher Hitchens
#27. Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.
Christopher Hitchens
#28. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother
Christopher Hitchens
#29. The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example.
Christopher Hitchens
#30. A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.
Christopher Hitchens
#31. People keep saying, "God is in the details". He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.
Christopher Hitchens
#32. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Christopher Hitchens
#34. Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry; here in the USA it seemed to be true that if you dared to give things 'your best shot' then the other much-used phrases like 'land of opportunity' would kick in as well.
Christopher Hitchens
#36. This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?
Christopher Hitchens
#37. It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.
Christopher Hitchens
#38. As Shakespeare put it in 'King Lear,' the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.
Christopher Hitchens
#39. There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.
Christopher Hitchens
#40. When the book was published, I had just turned sixty-one. I am writing this at a moment when, according to my doctors, I cannot be certain of celebrating another birthday.
Christopher Hitchens
#41. Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.
Christopher Hitchens
#42. while courage is not in itself one of the primary virtues, it is the quality that makes the exercise of the virtues possible.
Christopher Hitchens
#43. It is a tragic and potentially lethal irony that those who most despise science and the method of free inquiry should have been able to pilfer from it and annex its sophisticated products to their sick dreams.
Christopher Hitchens
#44. Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.
Christopher Hitchens
#45. It's considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don't see why that's considered a normal thing.
Christopher Hitchens
#46. The creation story is ridiculous garbage. And has given us a completely false picture of our origin as a species and the origins of the cosmos. If you want a good mythical story it would be the life of Socrates.
Christopher Hitchens
#47. So there's nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn't really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it's the most nauseating spectacle.
Christopher Hitchens
#48. There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn't be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.
Christopher Hitchens
#51. People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.
Christopher Hitchens
#52. When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.
Christopher Hitchens
#53. The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.
Christopher Hitchens
#54. I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.
Christopher Hitchens
#55. Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.
Christopher Hitchens
#56. Be ... suspicious ... of all those who employ the term 'we' or 'us' without your permission. This is [a] form of surreptitious conscription ... Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.
Christopher Hitchens
#57. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful.
Christopher Hitchens
#58. Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.
Christopher Hitchens
#59. It's amazing how relaxing it is not to claim you know more than you do. I'm surprised that those who claim to speak in the name of god don't take more advantage of this relief.
Christopher Hitchens
#60. I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.
Christopher Hitchens
#61. But now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.
Christopher Hitchens
#62. The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
Christopher Hitchens
#63. Revolution from above, in some states and cases, is [ ... ] often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.
Christopher Hitchens
#64. Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.
Christopher Hitchens
#65. It is a deformity in some 'radicals' to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or 'real' one. Many a purge or show trial has got merrily under way in this manner.
Christopher Hitchens
#66. Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
Christopher Hitchens
#67. Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faintly sinister - that redolence of moral blackmail that adheres to certain charitable appeals and certain kinds of politician. (Not for nothing is baby-kissing the synonym for public insincerity.)
Christopher Hitchens
#68. For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.
Christopher Hitchens
#70. Doubt, skepticism, innovation, and inquiry are the only means by which wonder, beauty, awe, and symmetry will be discovered.
Christopher Hitchens
#71. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.
Christopher Hitchens
#72. I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.
Christopher Hitchens
#74. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.
Christopher Hitchens
#75. How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.
Christopher Hitchens
#77. If you think all this is going on, all these gigantic fields of gravity and light with you in mind, then you really do have a self-centredness problem.
Christopher Hitchens
#78. I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.
Christopher Hitchens
#79. The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.
Christopher Hitchens
#80. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
Christopher Hitchens
#81. One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.
Christopher Hitchens
#82. Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.'
Christopher Hitchens
#83. Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed - in view of the overall shortage of time - by patience.
Christopher Hitchens
#84. The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.
Christopher Hitchens
#85. I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.
Christopher Hitchens
#86. If only you were half so good as he! He sins no sins but gentle drunkenness, Great-hearted mirth, and kind adultery.
Christopher Hitchens
#87. Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled ...
Christopher Hitchens
#88. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.
Christopher Hitchens
#89. We know that our life is essentially tragic. I'm absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, "Why didn't you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind."
Christopher Hitchens
#90. Jesus, it is true, shows no personal interest in gain, but he does speak of treasure in heaven and even of "mansions" as an inducement to follow him. Is it not further true that all religions down the ages have shown a keen interest in the amassment of material goods in the real world?
Christopher Hitchens
#91. Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.
Christopher Hitchens
#92. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable,
Christopher Hitchens
#93. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Christopher Hitchens
#94. If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
Christopher Hitchens
#95. If you say "the economy," you show you're stupid. There's no such thing as the economy. There is not a unity between the forces of production and the relations of production.
Christopher Hitchens
#96. If only religion were an opiate. No known narcotic rots the brain so fast.
Christopher Hitchens
#97. One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.
Christopher Hitchens
#98. The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can't be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.
Christopher Hitchens
#99. The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
Christopher Hitchens
#100. I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.
Christopher Hitchens
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