Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I’ve been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.”

— Christopher Hitchens

352. “Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.”

— Christopher Hitchens

353. “I don’t think there’s any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don’t know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.”

— Christopher Hitchens

354. “I think the materialist conception of history is valid.”

— Christopher Hitchens

355. “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

356. “I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.”

— Christopher Hitchens

357. “Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!”

— Christopher Hitchens

358. “Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.”

— Christopher Hitchens

359. “If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

— Christopher Hitchens

360. “I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes.”

— Christopher Hitchens

361. “An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence.”

— Christopher Hitchens

362. “The thing about religion is that it’s the first and the worst. The worst because it’s the first.”

— Christopher Hitchens

363. “With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven’s sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork.”

— Christopher Hitchens

364. “I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.”

— Christopher Hitchens

365. “I’m not very impressed by people who yell “traitor” and “communist” and other less printable things. I don’t like it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

366. “Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth.”

— Christopher Hitchens

367. “It’s probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory.”

— Christopher Hitchens

368. “When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen.”

— Christopher Hitchens

369. “Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.”

— Christopher Hitchens

370. “It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one.”

— Christopher Hitchens

371. “You should be nicer to him,? a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. ‘He has no friends.’ This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

372. “The Postmodernists’ tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.”

— Christopher Hitchens

373. “The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.”

— Christopher Hitchens

374. “Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.”

— Christopher Hitchens

375. “If you’ve led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it’s precisely the cancer that you’d expect to get. That’s a bit of a yawn.”

— Christopher Hitchens

376. “To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.”

— Christopher Hitchens

377. “It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.”

— Christopher Hitchens

378. “All the time, I’ve felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn’t.”

— Christopher Hitchens

379. “I’m not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.”

— Christopher Hitchens

380. “Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think ‘first woman president.’ We think – for example – ‘first ex-co-president’ or ‘first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent’ or ’first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband’s perjury rap.”

— Christopher Hitchens

381. “There either is a god or there is not; there is a ‘design’ or not.”

— Christopher Hitchens

382. “I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I’m still quite robust.”

— Christopher Hitchens

383. “Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.”

— Christopher Hitchens

384. “Old-fashioned people still say “bless you” when one sneezes, but they have forgotten the reason for the custom. The reason was that people were thought to sneeze out their souls, and before their souls could get back lurking demons were apt to enter the unsouled body; but if any one said “God bless you,” the demons were frightened off.”

— Christopher Hitchens

385. “Imponderable Sir, I presume from some if not all of your many reputations that you might prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith or the smoking tributes of bloody altars.”

— Christopher Hitchens

386. “We become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang.”

— Christopher Hitchens

387. “In a Pyongyang restaurant, don’t ever ask for a doggie bag.”

— Christopher Hitchens

388. “In modern Greek history, there is a close relationship between national humiliation and political radicalization.”

— Christopher Hitchens

389. “Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene road.”

— Christopher Hitchens

390. “You can only have one aim per debate.”

— Christopher Hitchens

391. “Indeed, it’s futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.”

— Christopher Hitchens

392. “Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.”

— Christopher Hitchens

393. “The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.”

— Christopher Hitchens

394. “We have millions and millions of North Korean children totally stunted in mind and body and will have to be dealt with at some point, who have been raised to believe that they live in a regime that is run by a god.”

— Christopher Hitchens

395. “The noble title of “dissident” must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.”

— Christopher Hitchens

396. “Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.”

— Christopher Hitchens

397. “When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I’m in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn’t feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.”

— Christopher Hitchens

398. “Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.”

— Christopher Hitchens

399. “It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.”

— Christopher Hitchens

400. “I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don’t see why anybody does.”

— Christopher Hitchens