Top 500 Christopher Hitchens Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— Christopher Hitchens

402. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

410. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

425. “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

426. “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

427. “As Bertie Wooster once phrased it, they experienced some difficulty in detecting the bluebird.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

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

— Christopher Hitchens

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

442. “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

443. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Christopher Hitchens

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Christopher Hitchens

449. “There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.”

— Christopher Hitchens

450. “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