Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that ‘issue’ I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.”

— Christopher Hitchens

152. “Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled...”

— Christopher Hitchens

153. “When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response – which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up – contains almost all that needs to be said on this point.”

— Christopher Hitchens

154. “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

155. “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

156. “I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.”

— Christopher Hitchens

157. “There is an old Belfast joke about the man stopped at a roadblock and asked his religion. When he replies that he is an atheist he is asked, “Protestant or Catholic atheist?”

— Christopher Hitchens

158. “Religion makes kind people say unkind things: “I must prove my faith, so mutilate the genitals of my children.” They wouldn’t do that if God didn’t tell them to do so.”

— Christopher Hitchens

159. “A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.”

— Christopher Hitchens

160. “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”

— Christopher Hitchens

161. “Those who want to be offended don’t have the right to try and close down the newspaper that offends them.”

— Christopher Hitchens

162. “Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.”

— Christopher Hitchens

163. “There are also people who say it’s God’s curse on me that I should have it near my throat because that was the organ of blasphemy which I used for so many years. I’ve used many other organs to blaspheme as well if it comes to that.”

— Christopher Hitchens

164. “You notice how liberals keep saying, ‘If only Islam would have a Reformation’ – it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way.”

— Christopher Hitchens

165. “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

166. “I am a person of faith: I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all.”

— Christopher Hitchens

167. “I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.’ Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

— Christopher Hitchens

168. “I am so made that I cannot believe.”

— Christopher Hitchens

169. “God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.”

— Christopher Hitchens

170. “In my life, the only certainty is to be uncertain. I’m an unbeliever who believes in skepticism. I’m only sure about being unsure.”

— Christopher Hitchens

171. “The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.”

— Christopher Hitchens

172. “To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off.”

— Christopher Hitchens

173. “David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism .”

— Christopher Hitchens

174. “What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.”

— Christopher Hitchens

175. “I don’t say things like “the grace of God.” All that’s white noise to me, not because I’m an intellectual. For many people, it’s gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy.”

— Christopher Hitchens

176. “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.”

— Christopher Hitchens

177. “It especially annoys me when racists are accused of ‘discrimination.’ The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”

— Christopher Hitchens

178. “The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has – from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.”

— Christopher Hitchens

179. “My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever.”

— Christopher Hitchens

180. “We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.”

— Christopher Hitchens

181. “I could be spending time looking through a telescope or into a microscope and finding out the most extraordinary, wonderful things, but people say faith can move mountains. Faith in what, by the way? You haven’t said.”

— Christopher Hitchens

182. “And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.”

— Christopher Hitchens

183. “Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.”

— Christopher Hitchens

184. “We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child’s social origin with its physical well-being.”

— Christopher Hitchens

185. “There cannot be a censor, or a censorship that does not degenerate into absurdity and corruption, there never has been, and there never will be and of all the excuses for it that there could be, that it protects superstition, and religious fanaticism would be the worst.”

— Christopher Hitchens

186. “The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.”

— Christopher Hitchens

187. “It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.”

— Christopher Hitchens

188. “In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.”

— Christopher Hitchens

189. “Richard Dawkins may have phrased it most pungently when he argued that everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god – from Ra to Shiva – in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.”

— Christopher Hitchens

190. “Almost all religions from Buddhism to Islam feature either a humble prophet or a prince who comes to identify with the poor, but what is this if not populism? It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.”

— Christopher Hitchens

191. “No one can deny, in face of the evidence, that it is easy, given military power, to produce a population of fanatical lunatics. It would be equally easy to produce a population of sane and reasonable people, but many governments do not wish to do so, since such people would fail to admire the politicians who are at the head of these governments.”

— Christopher Hitchens

192. “Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.”

— Christopher Hitchens

193. “Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

194. “I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

196. “Today I want to puke when I hear the word ‘radical’ applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.”

— Christopher Hitchens

197. “As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden’s carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.”

— Christopher Hitchens

198. “If one must have faith in order to believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding and has confronted us with findings far more “miraculous” and “transcendent” than any theology.”

— Christopher Hitchens

199. “I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do.”

— Christopher Hitchens

200. “My political life has been informed by the view that if there was any truth to religion there wouldn’t really be any need for politics.”

— Christopher Hitchens