Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Science Quotes

2. “Take the risk of thinking for yourself.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Risk-Taking Quotes

3. “Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Silence Quotes

4. “It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.”

— Christopher Hitchens

5. “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

— Christopher Hitchens

6. “Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.”

— Christopher Hitchens

7. “There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.”

— Christopher Hitchens

8. “Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus.”

— Christopher Hitchens

9. “Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.”

— Christopher Hitchens

10. “Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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11. “Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

— Christopher Hitchens

12. “I am, I hope, never offensive by accident.”

— Christopher Hitchens

13. “The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.”

— Christopher Hitchens

14. “Exceptional claims, require exceptional evidence.”

— Christopher Hitchens

15. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. – Hitchens 3:16.”

— Christopher Hitchens

16. “I don’t have a body, I am a body.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Quotes About the Body

17. “The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.”

— Christopher Hitchens

18. “Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

19. “Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

— Christopher Hitchens

20. “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

21. “To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’”

— Christopher Hitchens

22. “I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt, and I claim that right.”

— Christopher Hitchens

23. “The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Struggle Quotes, Anxiety Quotes, Sleep Quotes

24. “The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.”

— Christopher Hitchens

25. “If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.”

— Christopher Hitchens

26. “I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.”

— Christopher Hitchens

27. “There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.”

— Christopher Hitchens

28. “I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Innovation Quotes

29. “Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.”

— Christopher Hitchens

30. “My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Quotes About Numbers

31. “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”

— Christopher Hitchens

32. “I’m an atheist. I’m not neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.”

— Christopher Hitchens

33. “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.”

— Christopher Hitchens

34. “Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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35. “In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.”

— Christopher Hitchens

36. “Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.”

— Christopher Hitchens

37. “Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.”

— Christopher Hitchens

38. “A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can’t make old friends.”

— Christopher Hitchens

39. “Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.”

— Christopher Hitchens

40. “Jesus is Santa Claus for Adults.”

— Christopher Hitchens

41. “I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

42. “Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.”

— Christopher Hitchens

43. “The finest fury is the most controlled.”

— Christopher Hitchens

44. “No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.”

— Christopher Hitchens

45. “Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.”

— Christopher Hitchens

46. “I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.”

— Christopher Hitchens

47. “Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.”

— Christopher Hitchens

48. “All of life is a wager.”

— Christopher Hitchens

49. “Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form.”

— Christopher Hitchens

50. “I’m dying, but so are you.”

— Christopher Hitchens