Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you – free. – Kingsley Amis.”

— Christopher Hitchens

452. “The origin of superstition above given affords us a clear reason for the fact, that it comes to all men naturally, though some refer its rise to a dim notion of God, universal to mankind, and also tends to show, that it is no less inconsistent and variable than other mental hallucinations and emotional impulses, and further that it can only be maintained by hope, hatred, anger, and deceit; since it springs, not from reason, but solely from the more powerful phases of emotion.”

— Christopher Hitchens

453. “Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama’s Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified ‘white’ candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?”

— Christopher Hitchens

454. “No moral person would do such a thing unless they thought it was divinely warranted.”

— Christopher Hitchens

455. “I’m terrified of losing my voice.”

— Christopher Hitchens

456. “There is no reason at all why there aren’t enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.”

— Christopher Hitchens

457. “I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

458. “To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.”

— Christopher Hitchens

459. “I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.”

— Christopher Hitchens

460. “So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion.”

— Christopher Hitchens

461. “Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power.”

— Christopher Hitchens

462. “I became a journalist because one didn’t have to specialise.”

— Christopher Hitchens

463. “I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don’t think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn’t Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?”

— Christopher Hitchens

464. “Well, I’ll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.”

— Christopher Hitchens

465. “I vote and I do jury duty.”

— Christopher Hitchens

466. “I retain what’s interesting to me, but I don’t have a lot of strategic depth.”

— Christopher Hitchens

467. “You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

468. “Jefferson writes dismissively of slaves that “their griefs are transient.” American white supremacists to this day maintain that blacks are “mud people” because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing – they are not capable of summoning “blood in the face,” as the.”

— Christopher Hitchens

469. “I’ve proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.”

— Christopher Hitchens

470. “If people I’ve never met or don’t know say that what I’ve written or done or said means anything to them, then I’m happy to take it at face value, for once. It cheers me up.”

— Christopher Hitchens

471. “Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.”

— Christopher Hitchens

472. “The brief answer is that I have become inured without becoming indifferent.”

— Christopher Hitchens

473. “And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.”

— Christopher Hitchens

474. “How sad to be a woman – not to know Aught of the glory of this breast of snow, All unconcerned to comb this mighty hair; To be a woman and yet never know! Were I a woman, I would all day long Sing my own beauty in some holy song, Bend low before it, hushed and half afraid, And say “I am a woman” all day long.”

— Christopher Hitchens

475. “There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.”

— Christopher Hitchens

476. “Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.”

— Christopher Hitchens

477. “The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae.”

— Christopher Hitchens

478. “I’d like to prove to other people that it’s not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer.”

— Christopher Hitchens

479. “If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.”

— Christopher Hitchens

480. “I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.”

— Christopher Hitchens

481. “Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.”

— Christopher Hitchens

482. “Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”

— Christopher Hitchens

483. “The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.”

— Christopher Hitchens

484. “To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.”

— Christopher Hitchens

485. “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

486. “Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.”

— Christopher Hitchens

487. “I have a strong constitution which has served me quite well, though if I hadn’t had such a strong one I might have led a more healthy life perhaps.”

— Christopher Hitchens

488. “Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.”

— Christopher Hitchens

489. “When mass rapes occurred in the course of aggressive war in Bangladesh and later in Bosnia, Mother Teresa in the first case and the Pope in the second made strenuous appeals to the victims not to abort the seed of the invader and the violator.”

— Christopher Hitchens

490. “Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can’t think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.”

— Christopher Hitchens

491. “The United States makes large claims for itself, among them the claim that the nation is the model for a society based simultaneously on democracy and multiethnicity. It’s certainly no exaggeration to say that on the success or failure of this principle much else depends. But there must be better ways of affirming it than by clinging to an insipid parody of a two-party system that counts as a virtue the ability to escape thorny questions and postpone larger ones.”

— Christopher Hitchens

492. “This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the “infinite capacity for taking pains” that Thomas Carlyle once described as the constituent of genius.”

— Christopher Hitchens

493. “His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word ‘Orwellian’ in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.”

— Christopher Hitchens

494. “Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility and abjection, requiring you to regard yourself as conceived and born in sin and owing a duty to a stern creator. But in return, it places you at the center of the universe and assures you that you are the personal object of a heavenly plan.”

— Christopher Hitchens

495. “Very often, people embarking on such guesswork make the vulgar assumption that the lower the motives, the more likely they are to be authentic.”

— Christopher Hitchens

496. “Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.”

— Christopher Hitchens

497. “Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a ‘first generation’ of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.”

— Christopher Hitchens

498. “In a time when both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.”

— Christopher Hitchens

499. “Of the numerous regrettable elements that go to make up the unlawful carnal-knowledge industry, I should single out for distinction the look of undisguised contempt that is often worn on the faces of its female staff. Some of the working ‘hostesses’ may have to simulate delight or even interest – itself a pretty cock-shriveling thought – but when these same ladies do the negotiating, they can shrug off the fake charm as a snake discards an unwanted skin.”

— Christopher Hitchens

500. “Did I ever think I might have been wrong? Yes, sometimes and briefly. But never because of the supposed majority against me.”

— Christopher Hitchens