Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

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403. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

405. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

417. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

425. “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

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426. “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

427. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

428. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

431. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

Featured in: Book Quotes

440. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

443. “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

444. “The United States makes large claims for itself, among them the claim that the nation is the model for a society based simultaneously on democracy and multiethnicity. It’s certainly no exaggeration to say that on the success or failure of this principle much else depends. But there must be better ways of affirming it than by clinging to an insipid parody of a two-party system that counts as a virtue the ability to escape thorny questions and postpone larger ones.”

— Christopher Hitchens

445. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

446. “One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.”

— Christopher Hitchens

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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