Top 100 Hitchens's Quotes
#1. Mr Hitchens's policy has succeeded in making 10,000 new Bin Ladens.
George Galloway
#2. The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.
Christopher Hitchens
#3. It's a better tradition for people who think for themselves and who don't pray in aid of any supernatural authority. That's what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition.
Christopher Hitchens
#4. Littera scripta manet - 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.
Christopher Hitchens
#5. A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It's not moral to lie to children. It's not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It's immoral.
Christopher Hitchens
#6. The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me'.
Christopher Hitchens
#7. The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.
Christopher Hitchens
#8. It [Obama's Nobel peace prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.
Christopher Hitchens
#9. I'm not as I was but at this present moment I have to say, I feel very envious of someone who's young and active and starting out in the argument. Just think of the extraordinary things that are waiting to be known
Christopher Hitchens
#10. It is a terrible thing to feel sorry for one's mother or indeed father. And it's an additionally awful thing to feel this and to know the impotence of the adolescent to do anything at all about it. Worse still, perhaps, is the selfish consolation that it isn't really one's job to rear one's parents.
Christopher Hitchens
#11. If anyone's interested in the alleviation of poverty ...
the only thing we know definitely works
is giving women control over their own reproduction
Christopher Hitchens
#12. I don't say things like "the grace of God." All that's white noise to me, not because I'm an intellectual. For many people, it's gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy.
Christopher Hitchens
#13. One can't live without fear, it's a question of what is your attitude towards fear? I'm afraid of a sordid death. I'm afraid that I will die in an ugly or squalid way, and cancer can be very vigorous in that respect.
Christopher Hitchens
#14. Few would argue that Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous atheist, especially now that his friend and rival for the title, Christopher Hitchens, has now gone to meet his Maker.
Ray Comfort
#15. To read of the unrelenting coarseness and brutality of the boy's father is lowering to the spirit, as is the shame he felt at his mother's reputation for unchastity.
Christopher Hitchens
#16. The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you
Christopher Hitchens
#17. The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?
Christopher Hitchens
#18. Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that "universal eligibility to be noble," as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all.
Christopher Hitchens
#19. I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
Terry Eagleton
#20. I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit.
Christopher Hitchens
#21. It's the minute fanaticism and superiority of the Almanach that offends: the chilling and narrowing of the kinship tie into something denatured and artificial.
Christopher Hitchens
#22. The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian's fixation on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis, he became one himself.
Alex Pareene
#23. The thing about religion is that it's the first and the worst. The worst because it's the first.
Christopher Hitchens
#24. You don't so much as become an atheist as find out that's what you are. There's no moment of conversion. You don't suddenly think 'I don't believe this anymore.' You essentially find you don't believe it.
Christopher Hitchens
#25. As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only.
Christopher Hitchens
#27. It's like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world.
Christopher Hitchens
#28. It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.
Christopher Hitchens
#29. The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.
Christopher Hitchens
#30. I think that people's sexual preferences are a legitimate subject for humour, dirty humour if at all possible.
Christopher Hitchens
#31. 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
#32. People say, "What's it like to be a minority of one, or a kick-bag for the Internet?" It washes off me like jizz off a porn star's face.
Christopher Hitchens
#33. 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
#34. In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, no child's behind left.
Christopher Hitchens
#36. 'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.
Christopher Hitchens
#37. As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.
Christopher Hitchens
#38. Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.
Christopher Hitchens
#39. Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.
Christopher Hitchens
#40. Either one attributes one's presence here to the laws of biology and physics, or one attributes it to a divine design.
Christopher Hitchens
#41. I think that anti-Jewish prejudice is an unfailing sign of a sick and disordered person ... It's a horrible, conspiratorial, pseudo-intellectual, mean spirited, eventually lethal piece of bigotry.
Christopher Hitchens
#43. It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.
Christopher Hitchens
#44. I'd like to prove to other people that it's not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer.
Christopher Hitchens
#45. The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.
Christopher Hitchens
#46. People like Mr Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood, and it's utterly and completely contemptible.
George Galloway
#47. It's always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it's the victim of violence who is "really" inciting it.
Christopher Hitchens
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Thus in order to be a "radical" one must be open to the possibility that one's own core assumptions are misconceived.
Christopher Hitchens
#51. One of my first reservations about Zionism was and is that, semiconsciously at least, it grants the anti-Semite's first premise about the abnormality of the Jew.
Christopher Hitchens
#52. [Even if the U.S. doesn't attack] Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion.
Christopher Hitchens
#53. It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.
Christopher Hitchens
#54. I'm not afraid of being dead, that's to say there's nothing to be afraid of. I won't know I'm dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I'm alive in any way at all, that'll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.
Christopher Hitchens
#55. The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.
Christopher Hitchens
#56. There's no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified there. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.
Christopher Hitchens
#57. But here are wine and beautiful young girls, Be wise and hide your sorrows in their curls, Dive as you will in life's mysterious sea, You shall not bring us any better pearls.
Christopher Hitchens
#58. The state was founded, actually, I think the year that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. And it's as if they sort of took the book and thought, I wonder if we could make this work?
Christopher Hitchens
#59. I haven't seen much socially redeeming about religion. I'm an atheist. I don't here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It's boring.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#60. [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
#61. Populists (and 'national socialists') look at the supposedly secret deals that run the world 'behind the scenes'. Child's play. Except that childishness is sinister in adults.
Christopher Hitchens
#62. It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.
Christopher Hitchens
#63. There are two clocks ticking in Iran. One is the democracy movement clock which is ticking now faster than it was but it's got a lot of catching up to do. And then there's the clock that's ticking towards a nuclear weaponry.
Christopher Hitchens
#64. 'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.
Christopher Hitchens
#65. The whole reason for the success of Dr. King's civil-rights movement was that it was not a movement for itself. The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all.
Christopher Hitchens
#66. A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it's employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.
Christopher Hitchens
#67. Paine and Joel Barlow attempted to change Jefferson's mind, urging him to settle thrifty German immigrants in the new lands and to permit black families to travel from other states to acquire their own land there, but the sugar interest triumphed,
Christopher Hitchens
#68. It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.
Christopher Hitchens
#69. I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
Christopher Hitchens
#70. I think everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there's more to life than just matter. But I think it's very important to keep that under control and not to hand it over to be exploited by priests and shamans and rabbis and other riffraff.
Christopher Hitchens
#71. I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.
Christopher Hitchens
#72. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.
Christopher Hitchens
#73. It's a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has God in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride.
Christopher Hitchens
#74. 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
#75. Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.
Christopher Hitchens
#76. If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn.
Christopher Hitchens
#77. 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
#78. I began the project of judging Mother Teresa's reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.
Christopher Hitchens
#79. Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.
Christopher Hitchens
#80. I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it's a form of love, and it deserves our respect for that reason.
Christopher Hitchens
#81. I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.
Christopher Hitchens
#82. It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.
Christopher Hitchens
#83. I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.
Christopher Hitchens
#84. I'm a member of no party. I have no ideology. I'm a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that's all around us.
Christopher Hitchens
#85. 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
#86. I think that all filth is local ... and that a joke isn't a joke unless it's at somebody's expense
Christopher Hitchens
#87. It's [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren't even young and beautiful now.
Christopher Hitchens
#88. 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
#89. You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.
Christopher Hitchens
#90. America was not interventionist enough, which, of course, did mean a bit of a breach with old comrades on the left. I felt the international left in the countries concerned took the same position as I did. So, in my view, it's the left that's become reactionary and isolationist and parochial.
Christopher Hitchens
#91. We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.
Christopher Hitchens
#92. It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory
Christopher Hitchens
#93. I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.
Christopher Hitchens
#94. Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.
Christopher Hitchens
#95. Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God's on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.
Christopher Hitchens
#96. With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven's sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork.
Christopher Hitchens
#97. There is an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person's propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ.
Christopher Hitchens
#98. There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.
Christopher Hitchens
#99. Until the early middle years of the sixteenth century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It's
Christopher Hitchens
#100. There must be some connection between the general nullity of Christie's prose and the tendency of her detectives to take Jewishness as a symptom of crime.
Christopher Hitchens
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