Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “Of course, I do everything for money.”

— Christopher Hitchens

302. “Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

304. “The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.”

— Christopher Hitchens

305. “I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.”

— Christopher Hitchens

306. “Chemotherapy isn’t good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, ‘Well that is a good thing because it’s supposed to be poison. If it’s making the tumor feel this queasy, then I’m OK with it.’”

— Christopher Hitchens

307. “Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed – in view of the overall shortage of time – by patience.”

— Christopher Hitchens

308. “Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

310. “I shall simply say that those who offer false consolation are false friends.”

— Christopher Hitchens

311. “The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage.”

— Christopher Hitchens

312. “The violence in the Bible is appalling.”

— Christopher Hitchens

313. “Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.”

— Christopher Hitchens

314. “For some reason, many religions force themselves to think of the birth canal as a one-way street, and even the Koran treats the Virgin Mary with reverence.”

— Christopher Hitchens

315. “I don’t have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I’ve been too lucky and that I’m over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated.”

— Christopher Hitchens

316. “When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that ‘he may tarry,’ we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.”

— Christopher Hitchens

317. “I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. For so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane.”

— Christopher Hitchens

318. “So there’s nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn’t really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it’s the most nauseating spectacle.”

— Christopher Hitchens

319. “Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.”

— Christopher Hitchens

320. “Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward.”

— Christopher Hitchens

321. “We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.”

— Christopher Hitchens

322. “As long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffuse feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.”

— Christopher Hitchens

323. “What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.”

— Christopher Hitchens

324. “The reading public isn’t born that doesn’t think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.”

— Christopher Hitchens

325. “The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.”

— Christopher Hitchens

326. “Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday’s.”

— Christopher Hitchens

327. “High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.”

— Christopher Hitchens

328. “The stupider the regime the more intelligent the people get and the more humorous.”

— Christopher Hitchens

329. “To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.”

— Christopher Hitchens

330. “A celebrity is well known for being well known. I’m relatively well known – but for what I’ve written and said, or so I fondly imagine.”

— Christopher Hitchens

331. “Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of ’the flock.”

— Christopher Hitchens

332. “I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.”

— Christopher Hitchens

333. “I’m reminded of the lady governor of Texas who, during a controversy about bilingualism in the State House in Austin, said if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it was plenty good enough for her.”

— Christopher Hitchens

334. “This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?”

— Christopher Hitchens

335. “In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.”

— Christopher Hitchens

336. “It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy’s children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy’s graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.”

— Christopher Hitchens

337. “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

338. “And yet, I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance. I probably ought to carry around some kind of thermometer or other instrument, to keep checking that I am not falling prey to premature curmudgeonhood.”

— Christopher Hitchens

339. “If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka .”

— Christopher Hitchens

340. “My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.”

— Christopher Hitchens

341. “At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.”

— Christopher Hitchens

342. “History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.”

— Christopher Hitchens

343. “It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring.”

— Christopher Hitchens

344. “Don’t take security in the false refuge of consensus.”

— Christopher Hitchens

345. “My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.”

— Christopher Hitchens

346. “Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don’t introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.”

— Christopher Hitchens

347. “To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.”

— Christopher Hitchens

348. “The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.”

— Christopher Hitchens

349. “We know that our life is essentially tragic. I’m absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, “Why didn’t you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind.””

— Christopher Hitchens

350. “I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.”

— Christopher Hitchens