Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”

— Christopher Hitchens

52. “Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.”

— Christopher Hitchens

53. “We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.”

— Christopher Hitchens

54. “You have to choose your future regrets.”

— Christopher Hitchens

55. “Religion gets its morality from us. We don’t get our morality from religion.”

— Christopher Hitchens

56. “To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?”

— Christopher Hitchens

57. “My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.”

— Christopher Hitchens

58. “The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.”

— Christopher Hitchens

59. “To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.”

— Christopher Hitchens

60. “I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.”

— Christopher Hitchens

61. “Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.”

— Christopher Hitchens

62. “The atheist proposition is the following – most of the time – it may not be said that there is no god; it may be said that there is no reason to think that there is one.”

— Christopher Hitchens

63. “Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.”

— Christopher Hitchens

64. “Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.”

— Christopher Hitchens

65. “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

66. “Its a matter of principle. If Jews born in Brooklyn have a right to a state in Palestine then Palestinians born in Jerusalem have a right to a state in Palestine.”

— Christopher Hitchens

67. “Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.”

— Christopher Hitchens

68. “The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.”

— Christopher Hitchens

69. “It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.”

— Christopher Hitchens

70. “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

71. “Doubt, skepticism, innovation, and inquiry are the only means by which wonder, beauty, awe, and symmetry will be discovered.”

— Christopher Hitchens

72. “Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.”

— Christopher Hitchens

73. “Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can’t.”

— Christopher Hitchens

74. “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

75. “In one way, I suppose, I have been ‘in denial’ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.”

— Christopher Hitchens

76. “I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.”

— Christopher Hitchens

77. “I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.”

— Christopher Hitchens

78. “The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.”

— Christopher Hitchens

79. “What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.”

— Christopher Hitchens

80. “Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.”

— Christopher Hitchens

81. “If you can charm everyone it means you don’t care about anyone in particular.”

— Christopher Hitchens

82. “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

83. “One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on.”

— Christopher Hitchens

84. “Religion fosters servility and solipsism.”

— Christopher Hitchens

85. “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

86. “Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.”

— Christopher Hitchens

87. “That most risky and volatile of all things a self-pitying majority.”

— Christopher Hitchens

88. “The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.”

— Christopher Hitchens

89. “Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.”

— Christopher Hitchens

90. “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

91. “Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.”

— Christopher Hitchens

92. “If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.”

— Christopher Hitchens

93. “I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.”

— Christopher Hitchens

94. “Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.”

— Christopher Hitchens

95. “To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.”

— Christopher Hitchens

96. “It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.”

— Christopher Hitchens

97. “I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.”

— Christopher Hitchens

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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