Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.”

— Christopher Hitchens

102. “One can’t indefinitely do for somebody what he is reluctant to do for himself.”

— Christopher Hitchens

103. “Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

104. “What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.”

— Christopher Hitchens

105. “I want to live my life taking the risk – all the time – that I don’t know anything like-enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom... Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you.”

— Christopher Hitchens

106. “Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.”

— Christopher Hitchens

107. “Redemption is promised at the low price of surrender of your critical faculties.”

— Christopher Hitchens

108. “Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.”

— Christopher Hitchens

109. “Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.”

— Christopher Hitchens

110. “Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich st.”

— Christopher Hitchens

111. “Religion poisons everything.”

— Christopher Hitchens

112. “Beware of identity politics. I’ll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics.”

— Christopher Hitchens

113. “I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.”

— Christopher Hitchens

114. “Religion attacks us in our deepest integrity by saying we wouldn’t be able to make a moral decision without it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

115. “Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”

— Christopher Hitchens

116. “Will an Iraq war make our Al Qaeda problem worse? Not likely.”

— Christopher Hitchens

117. “Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil.”

— Christopher Hitchens

118. “How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”

— Christopher Hitchens

119. “What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.”

— Christopher Hitchens

120. “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

121. “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

122. “In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.”

— Christopher Hitchens

123. “There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of “little guy” or “silent majority” rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves.”

— Christopher Hitchens

124. “It is a tragic and potentially lethal irony that those who most despise science and the method of free inquiry should have been able to pilfer from it and annex its sophisticated products to their sick dreams.”

— Christopher Hitchens

125. “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

126. “The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.”

— Christopher Hitchens

127. “The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.”

— Christopher Hitchens

128. “Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.”

— Christopher Hitchens

129. “There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn’t be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.”

— Christopher Hitchens

130. “I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”

— Christopher Hitchens

131. “The creation story is ridiculous garbage. And has given us a completely false picture of our origin as a species and the origins of the cosmos. If you want a good mythical story it would be the life of Socrates.”

— Christopher Hitchens

132. “No child’s behind left.”

— Christopher Hitchens

133. “Reason is the Devil’s harlot, who can do nought but slander and harm whatever God says and does. – MARTIN LUTHER.”

— Christopher Hitchens

134. “The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.”

— Christopher Hitchens

135. “Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.”

— Christopher Hitchens

136. “The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head – chemo-brain they call it. It’s awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.”

— Christopher Hitchens

137. “Cheap booze is a false economy.”

— Christopher Hitchens

138. “A gentleman is never rude except on purpose – I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.”

— Christopher Hitchens

139. “Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.”

— Christopher Hitchens

140. “Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.”

— Christopher Hitchens

141. “The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.”

— Christopher Hitchens

142. “I’m very happy by myself – I’m lucky in that way – if I’ve got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

143. “The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

— Christopher Hitchens

144. “It’s often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven’t been made.”

— Christopher Hitchens

145. “On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god.”

— Christopher Hitchens

146. “Most of the utopian community ideas actually are religious. They’re based more on the idea of the monastery than the commune.”

— Christopher Hitchens

147. “I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.”

— Christopher Hitchens

148. “Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

149. “We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.”

— Christopher Hitchens

150. “With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.”

— Christopher Hitchens