Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

353. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

355. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

362. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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364. “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

365. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

368. “I’ve been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.”

— Christopher Hitchens

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

375. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

378. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

384. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

392. “There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

395. “The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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