Christopher Hitchens Quotes
Famous Christopher Hitchens Quotes
- “A gentleman is never rude except on purpose – I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.” –Christopher Hitchens.
- I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness. – Christopher Hitchens.
- “The finest fury is the most controlled.” –Christopher Hitchens.
- “Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.” – Christopher Hitchens. Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays.
- “Everything everyone thinks they know about (Mother Teresa) is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God. – Christopher Hitchens.
- “Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy.” – Christopher Hitchens, ‘Hitch 22’.
- I’m crepuscular. – Christopher Hitchens.
- “My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.” – Christopher Hitchens, ‘God Is Not Great’.
- “I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement (Libertarians) in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” Christopher Hitchens.
- “Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.” Christopher Hitchens.
- “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.” Christopher Hitchens.
- “To suggest that there’s something fascistic about me and about my beliefs is something I won’t hear said and you shouldn’t believe.” Christopher Hitchens.
- “I’m not afraid of being dead, that’s to say there’s nothing to be afraid of. I won’t know I’m dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I’m alive in any way at all, that’ll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.” Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens Quotes on Religion
- Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments. – Christopher Hitchens.
- “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” – Christopher Hitchens, ‘God Is Not Great.
- “We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.” – Christopher Hitchens, ‘God Is Not Great.
- “I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that (s)he knew or understood the mind of God. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess.”
- “The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.” – Christopher Hitchens, ‘God Is Not Great.
- “Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything.”
- “Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “I am not even an atheist so much as an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- “Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonizing death, but then be reborn to have an agonizing and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.'”– Christopher Hitchens.
- “I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind.” – Christopher Hitchens, ‘Hitch 22’.
- “We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system.” – Christopher Hitchens, ‘Hitch 22’.
- “It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so.” – Christopher Hitchens, ‘Hitch 22’.
- “Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist.
- I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.
- It doesn’t take much to make me angry. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Well, we can’t say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it. – Christopher Hitchens.
- In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I don’t consider myself to be that credulous. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I don’t envy or much respect people who are completely politicised. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I don’t think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again. – Christopher Hitchens.
- To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’ – Christopher Hitchens.
- A good day is one where I cannot just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me.
- I’m crepuscular. – Christopher Hitchens.
- “At a certain point talk about ‘essence’ and ‘oneness’ and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.” Christopher Hitchens.
- Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint. – Christopher Hitchens.
- “In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.” – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas. Christopher Hitchens I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny. – Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Jesus
- Even if I accepted that Jesus – like almost every other prophet on record – was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah and that he rose again from the dead and by His sacrifice, our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Jesus is Santa Claus for Adults. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Even if I accepted that Jesus – like almost every other prophet on record – was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected. – Christopher Hitchens.
- We have no proof that Socrates ever existed. We only know from witnesses to his life that he did. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything down. It doesn’t matter to me whether he did or not exist because we have his teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage. – Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens Quotes On Life
- I’m terrified of losing my voice. – Christopher Hitchens.
- When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time. – Christopher Hitchens.
- It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look at it, I think. 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.
- I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between a beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonizing death but then be reborn to have an agonizing and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there. – Christopher Hitchens.
- There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.
- I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded. – Christopher Hitchens.
- In one way, I suppose, I have been ‘in denial for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments. – Christopher Hitchens.
- You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can’t be English American. Why not? – Christopher Hitchens.
- Of course, I do everything for money. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- “The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).”
- ,The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, ‘He is not a lush.’ That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, ‘Look!’ – Christopher Hitchens.
- The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious. – Christopher Hitchens.
- What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. – Christopher Hitchens.
- My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either. – Christopher Hitchens.
- When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‘I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,’ and so forth, I switch off quite early. – Christopher Hitchens.
- When Caroline Kennedy managed to say ‘you know’ more than 200 times in an interview with the New York ‘Daily News,’ and on 130 occasions while talking to ‘The New York Times’ during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself. – Christopher Hitchens.
- One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I’m not that keen on the idea of being unconscious. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- Say ‘Toronto’ or ‘Ontario,’ and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Chemotherapy isn’t good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, ‘Well that is a good thing because it’s supposed to be poison. If it’s making the tumor feel this queasy, then I’m OK with it.’ – Christopher Hitchens.
- Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I don’t have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I’ve been too lucky and that I’m over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‘naive’ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‘bonsai.’ – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- It’s not at all good when your cancer is ‘palpable’ from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I was becoming post-ideological. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head – chemo-brain they call it. It’s awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime. I’ve came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I don’t think consensus-building politics is what I’m meant to be doing. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor. Christopher Hitchens ‘– Christopher Hitchens.
- Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age’ was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age. – Christopher Hitchens.
- My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There’s no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it’s American or British interests involved. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don’t see why anybody does. – Christopher Hitchens.
- When I look back on what I did for the Left, I’m in a small way quite proud of some of it – I only wish I’d done more. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I vote and I do jury duty. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars. – Christopher Hitchens.
- You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it’s the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there’s not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? – Christopher Hitchens.
- There’s a big difference, as I’m sure you know, it’s a slightly manneristic one, between people of the ’60s and people of ’68. Being a soixante-huitard – it’s so nice to have a French word for it – is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the ’60s. – Christopher Hitchens.
- If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The fact is: It’s true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it. – Christopher Hitchens.
- If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women. –Christopher Hitchens.
- A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books. – Christopher Hitchens.
- For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I’m not a conservative of any kind. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can’t fly home. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I still think like a Marxist in many ways. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I’m not resigned, but I’m realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it’s a certainty you’ll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it’s an awful process.
- Littera scripta manet – ‘The written word will remain’. That’s true, but it won’t be that much comfort to me. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I wanted to write. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Ordinary morality is innate in my view. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I retain what’s interesting to me, but I don’t have a lot of strategic depth. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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
- You notice how liberals keep saying, ‘If only Islam would have a Reformation’ – it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I like surprises. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The violence in the Bible is appalling. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I think the materialist conception of history is valid. – Christopher Hitchens.
- If you can talk, you can write. – Christopher Hitchens.
- You can only have one aim per debate. – Christopher Hitchens.
- There’s been some research in cognitive science, I’m told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it’s white noise. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I’m not a sheep. – Christopher Hitchens.
- There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar. – Christopher Hitchens.
- It’s surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I feel Anglo-American. – Christopher Hitchens.
- ‘WASP’ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I worked out early on to give up things I couldn’t do well at all. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I’ve proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- 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.
- To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I don’t even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much. – Christopher Hitchens.
- When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children. – Christopher Hitchens.
- A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it’s employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‘O.K.’ has deposed the more affirmative ‘Yes,’ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‘like’ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I’ve been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.
- 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.
- For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly. – Christopher Hitchens.
- 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.
- Obscenity comes from grime. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply. – Christopher Hitchens.
- In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. – Christopher Hitchens.
- I didn’t think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I’m not put together like the other chaps. – Christopher Hitchens.
- The citizens of Tumortown are forever assailed with cures and rumors of cures. – Christopher Hitchens.
- Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of ‘like’ has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables. – Christopher Hitchens.
Conclusion
Find inspiration with these carefully selected quotes from some of the Great minds to have ever Lived. Be Inspired