Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.”

— Christopher Hitchens

403. “In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.”

— Christopher Hitchens

404. “I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom...”

— Christopher Hitchens

405. “Ordinary morality is innate in my view.”

— Christopher Hitchens

406. “A sure sign of ineptitude and malice is manifested when one’s attacker is willing to cover himself with mud in order to try and make some of it adhere to his target.”

— Christopher Hitchens

407. “It’s impossible, I think, however much I’d become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don’t think I’d ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.”

— Christopher Hitchens

408. “Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed ‘we’ did. Well, does that not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power?”

— Christopher Hitchens

409. “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

410. “From a plurality of prime movers, the monotheists have bargained it down to a single one. They are getting ever nearer to the true, round figure.”

— Christopher Hitchens

411. “I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do. When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes. When I go to the synagogue, I cover my head. I once even observed the etiquette of an ashram in India, though this was a trial to me.”

— Christopher Hitchens

412. “I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.”

— Christopher Hitchens

413. “Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!”

— Christopher Hitchens

414. “The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can’t fly home.”

— Christopher Hitchens

415. “A bit of a stomach give a chap a position in society.”

— Christopher Hitchens

416. “Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries .”

— Christopher Hitchens

417. “Unlike other countries, it was founded on written proclamations. America is an ideal as well as a republic. Its documents are open to revisions. They’re works in progress. There’s an invitation to participate.”

— Christopher Hitchens

418. “Until the early middle years of the sixteenth century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It’s.”

— Christopher Hitchens

419. “George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as ‘evil.’ Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.”

— Christopher Hitchens

420. “There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.”

— Christopher Hitchens

421. “The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.”

— Christopher Hitchens

422. “In the late 1940s, a dystopian novel based on the notorious horrors of ‘National Socialism’ would probably have been very well-received. But it would have done nothing to shake the complacency of Western intellectuals concerning the system of state terror for which, at the time, so many of them had either a blind spot or a soft spot.”

— Christopher Hitchens

423. “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country, but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly – ‘Tis dearness only that gives everything its value.9.”

— Christopher Hitchens

424. “As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.”

— Christopher Hitchens

425. “My little ankle-strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her.”

— Christopher Hitchens

426. “If you think all this is going on, all these gigantic fields of gravity and light with you in mind, then you really do have a self-centredness problem.”

— Christopher Hitchens

427. “The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example.”

— Christopher Hitchens

428. “It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true.”

— Christopher Hitchens

429. “What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was ’perhaps.”

— Christopher Hitchens

430. “Where would you like to live? In a state of conflict or a conflicted state?”

— Christopher Hitchens

431. “How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?”

— Christopher Hitchens

432. “In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people’s possessions or fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have positive consequences.”

— Christopher Hitchens

433. “The term ‘the American Left’ is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn’t really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.”

— Christopher Hitchens

434. “If you don’t state a clear preference, then your drink is like a bad game of poker or a hasty drug transaction: It is whatever the dealer says it is. Please do try to bear this in mind.”

— Christopher Hitchens

435. “The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.”

— Christopher Hitchens

436. “I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.”

— Christopher Hitchens

437. “People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.”

— Christopher Hitchens

438. “It is certain, that, in every religion, however sublime the verbal definition which it gives of its divinity, many of the votaries, perhaps the greatest number, will still seek the divine favor, not by virtue and good morals, which alone can be acceptable to a perfect being, but either by frivolous observances, by intemperate zeal, by rapturous extasies, or by the belief of mysterious and absurd opinions.”

— Christopher Hitchens

439. “I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.”

— Christopher Hitchens

440. “I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.”

— Christopher Hitchens

441. “Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.”

— Christopher Hitchens

442. “People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.”

— Christopher Hitchens

443. “Within this quadrilateral of forces, Jefferson was to emerge as the republican equivalent of a philosopher king, who was coldly willing to sacrifice all principles and all allegiances to the one great aim of making America permanent.”

— Christopher Hitchens

444. “I don’t think consensus-building politics is what I’m meant to be doing.”

— Christopher Hitchens

445. “To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”

— Christopher Hitchens

446. “You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.”

— Christopher Hitchens

447. “No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.”

— Christopher Hitchens

448. “In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety.”

— Christopher Hitchens

449. “I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.”

— Christopher Hitchens

450. “The origin of superstition above given affords us a clear reason for the fact, that it comes to all men naturally, though some refer its rise to a dim notion of God, universal to mankind, and also tends to show, that it is no less inconsistent and variable than other mental hallucinations and emotional impulses, and further that it can only be maintained by hope, hatred, anger, and deceit; since it springs, not from reason, but solely from the more powerful phases of emotion.”

— Christopher Hitchens