Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.”

— Christopher Hitchens

452. “One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy ‘legacy’ is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and “torch-passing” rhetoric in general.”

— Christopher Hitchens

453. “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

454. “I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

456. “In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety.”

— Christopher Hitchens

457. “If you care about the points of agreement and civility, then, you had better be well-equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you are not then the “center” will be occupied and defined without your having helped to decide it, or determine what and where it is.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

459. “As Bertie Wooster once phrased it, they experienced some difficulty in detecting the bluebird.”

— Christopher Hitchens

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

467. “Friends call me Hitch. Maybe it can be turned into a 900-phone number. People would pay to talk to me.”

— Christopher Hitchens

468. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

472. “As is so often the case with pieces that appear in the Onion, I honestly could not decide whether this was a clever hoax or not – the arguments were almost exactly as stupid as the real thing.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Real Quotes

473. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

475. “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

476. “I vote and I do jury duty.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

479. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

482. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

494. “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

495. “Sartre distinguished between rebels and revolutionaries. The rebel, he says, secretly quite wants the world and the system to remain as it is. Its permanence, after all, is the guarantee of his continuing ability to “rebel.” The revolutionary, in contrast, really wishes to overthrow and replace existing conditions. The second enterprise is obviously no laughing matter.”

— Christopher Hitchens

496. “A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’...”

— Christopher Hitchens

497. “The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it’s American or British interests involved.”

— Christopher Hitchens

498. “When love goes bad nothing goes worse.”

— Christopher Hitchens

499. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens