Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.”

— Christopher Hitchens

202. “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

203. “In our world, surely the worst thing anyone can say is; ‘No further inquiry is needed. You’ve already got all you need to know.’ It is the most sinister and dangerous thing.”

— Christopher Hitchens

204. “The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. 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

205. “For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.”

— Christopher Hitchens

206. “No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.”

— Christopher Hitchens

207. “One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.”

— Christopher Hitchens

208. “I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism and liberal secular democracy, even less do I want to engage with those who are incapable of recognizing the basic moral distinction between premeditated mass murder and unintentional killing.”

— Christopher Hitchens

209. “It is a deformity in some ‘radicals’ to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or ‘real’ one. Many a purge or show trial has got merrily under way in this manner.”

— Christopher Hitchens

210. “The curse of Abraham continues to poison Hebron, but the religious warrant for blood sacrifice poisons our entire civilization.”

— Christopher Hitchens

211. “I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language – always the language – was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.”

— Christopher Hitchens

212. “You don’t say ‘they all do it’ unless you know you’ve been doing it too.”

— Christopher Hitchens

213. “Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.’”

— Christopher Hitchens

214. “It’s a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has God in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride.”

— Christopher Hitchens

215. “Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.”

— Christopher Hitchens

216. “A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.”

— Christopher Hitchens

217. “A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.”

— Christopher Hitchens

218. “The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.”

— Christopher Hitchens

219. “It is supposed to be an axiom of “Western” civilization that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as “order.”

— Christopher Hitchens

220. “Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.”

— Christopher Hitchens

221. “I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.”

— Christopher Hitchens

222. “This is a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way.”

— Christopher Hitchens

223. “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the “evidence” eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.”

— Christopher Hitchens

224. “Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.”

— Christopher Hitchens

225. “The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.”

— Christopher Hitchens

226. “Go too far outside “the box,” of course, and you will encounter a vernacular that is much less “tolerant.” Here, the key words are “fanatic,” “troublemaker,” “misfit” or “malcontent.”

— Christopher Hitchens

227. “It’s a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us – waking and sleeping – who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime – thought crime! Just for what we think! – who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams; who can create us sick – as apparently we are – and then order us on pain of eternal torture to be well again. To demand this, to wish this to be true, is to wish to live as an abject slave!”

— Christopher Hitchens

228. “Those who naively credit Gandhi with a conscientious or consistent pacifism might wish to ask if this did not amount to letting the Japanese imperialists do his fighting for him.”

— Christopher Hitchens

229. “I think the cultural task is to separate our impulses and needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.”

— Christopher Hitchens

230. “It’s a better tradition for people who think for themselves and who don’t pray in aid of any supernatural authority. That’s what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition.”

— Christopher Hitchens

231. “I’m very depressed how in this country you can be told “That’s offensive” as though those two words constitute an argument.”

— Christopher Hitchens

232. “I’m not as I was but at this present moment I have to say, I feel very envious of someone who’s young and active and starting out in the argument. Just think of the extraordinary things that are waiting to be known.”

— Christopher Hitchens

233. “The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.”

— Christopher Hitchens

234. “The faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.”

— Christopher Hitchens

235. “If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech.”

— Christopher Hitchens

236. “Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be determined.”

— Christopher Hitchens

237. “Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being “not even wrong.” Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.”

— Christopher Hitchens

238. “It is a settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute. The United States, while they wish for war with no nation, will buy peace with none.”

— Christopher Hitchens

239. “I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

240. “Yet again it is demonstrated that monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.”

— Christopher Hitchens

241. “Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world’s monotheisms. It builds upon its primitive Jewish and Christian predecessors, selecting a chunk here and a shard there, and thus if these fall, it partly falls also.”

— Christopher Hitchens

242. “The fact is: It’s true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

243. “Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.”

— Christopher Hitchens

244. “The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ’if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.”

— Christopher Hitchens

245. “Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.”

— Christopher Hitchens

246. “A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.”

— Christopher Hitchens

247. “Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.”

— Christopher Hitchens

248. “I’m not afraid of being dead, that’s to say there’s nothing to be afraid of. I won’t know I’m dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I’m alive in any way at all, that’ll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.”

— Christopher Hitchens

249. “I think that there is no supernatural dimension. The natural world is quite wonderful enough. The more we know about it, the much more wonderful it is than any supernatural proposition.”

— Christopher Hitchens

250. “To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.”

— Christopher Hitchens