Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.”

— Christopher Hitchens

252. “I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”

— Christopher Hitchens

253. “You can’t have occupation and human rights.”

— Christopher Hitchens

254. “The only known cure for poverty is emancipation of women.”

— Christopher Hitchens

255. “Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.”

— Christopher Hitchens

256. “Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.”

— Christopher Hitchens

257. “I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people.”

— Christopher Hitchens

258. “Internationalism is the highest form of patriotism.”

— Christopher Hitchens

259. “I personally want to “do” death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.”

— Christopher Hitchens

260. “One can’t live without fear, it’s a question of what is your attitude towards fear? I’m afraid of a sordid death. I’m afraid that I will die in an ugly or squalid way, and cancer can be very vigorous in that respect.”

— Christopher Hitchens

261. “Montaigne: “Religion’s surest foundation is the contempt for life.”

— Christopher Hitchens

262. “Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking.”

— Christopher Hitchens

263. “The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for “peace through strength” has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog.”

— Christopher Hitchens

264. “Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.”

— Christopher Hitchens

265. “The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.”

— Christopher Hitchens

266. “Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.”

— Christopher Hitchens

267. “The most educated person in the world now has to admit – I shall not say confess – that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.”

— Christopher Hitchens

268. “The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.”

— Christopher Hitchens

269. “Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.”

— Christopher Hitchens

270. “The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: “anima”-the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.”

— Christopher Hitchens

271. “If asked my opinion about virginity, I would say, “I’m opposed to it.” I don’t think it deserves to be celebrated, at any rate. Or at least, if I’m not opposed, I’m very highly skeptical and critical of it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

272. “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.”

— Christopher Hitchens

273. “If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.”

— Christopher Hitchens

274. “Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.”

— Christopher Hitchens

275. “If the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.”

— Christopher Hitchens

276. “Exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn’t so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside the baggy garments.”

— Christopher Hitchens

277. “There are two clocks ticking in Iran. One is the democracy movement clock which is ticking now faster than it was but it’s got a lot of catching up to do. And then there’s the clock that’s ticking towards a nuclear weaponry.”

— Christopher Hitchens

278. “I’m a single-issue voter, to get straight to the point. I’m really only interested in the candidate who’s toughest and least apologetic when it comes to the confrontation with Islamic Jihadism.”

— Christopher Hitchens

279. “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.”

— Christopher Hitchens

280. “As Edward Gibbon observed about the modes of worship prevalent in the Roman world, they were “considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful.”

— Christopher Hitchens

281. “It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.”

— Christopher Hitchens

282. “We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.”

— Christopher Hitchens

283. “It’s much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don’t know quite why this is true but it just is. Don’t ever be responsible for it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

284. “I began the project of judging Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.”

— Christopher Hitchens

285. “It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.”

— Christopher Hitchens

286. “For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.”

— Christopher Hitchens

287. “Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.”

— Christopher Hitchens

288. “If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.”

— Christopher Hitchens

289. “If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone.”

— Christopher Hitchens

290. “The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.”

— Christopher Hitchens

291. “The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.”

— Christopher Hitchens

292. “The road to Damascus was not and is not a one-way street.”

— Christopher Hitchens

293. “In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain.”

— Christopher Hitchens

294. “For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.”

— Christopher Hitchens

295. “Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.”

— Christopher Hitchens

296. “There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.”

— Christopher Hitchens

297. “A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.”

— Christopher Hitchens

298. “Perhaps the values of socialists can only be realized by socialists in a nonsocialist society.”

— Christopher Hitchens

299. “If you say “the economy,” you show you’re stupid. There’s no such thing as the economy. There is not a unity between the forces of production and the relations of production.”

— Christopher Hitchens

300. “It’s surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.”

— Christopher Hitchens