Christopher Hitchens Quotes

191 Sourced Quotes

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.

Christopher Hitchens
Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard — or try to turn back — the measurable advances that we have made.

Christopher Hitchens
To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'

Christopher Hitchens
Nothing optional — from homosexuality to adultery — is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.

Christopher Hitchens
It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.

Christopher Hitchens
A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'...

Christopher Hitchens
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

Christopher Hitchens
Atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it.

Christopher Hitchens
So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion.

Christopher Hitchens
Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.

Christopher Hitchens
My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.

Christopher Hitchens
I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do

Christopher Hitchens
For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going.

Christopher Hitchens
We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.

Christopher Hitchens
God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

Christopher Hitchens
It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.

Christopher Hitchens
To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.

Christopher Hitchens
Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

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. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.

Christopher Hitchens
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity

Christopher Hitchens
There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of "little guy" or "silent majority" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves.

Christopher Hitchens
The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.

Christopher Hitchens
A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles. The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth.

Christopher Hitchens
There are things about quitting the smoking habit for which nobody prepares you. Did I have any idea that I would indulge in long, drooling-nay, dribbling-lascivious dreams in which I was still wreathed in fragrant blue fumes? I would wake with the complete and guilty conviction that I had sinned in word and deed while I was asleep.

Christopher Hitchens
The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.

Christopher Hitchens
And yet, I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance. I probably ought to carry around some kind of thermometer or other instrument, to keep checking that I am not falling prey to premature curmudgeonhood.

Christopher Hitchens
Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.

Christopher Hitchens
We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.

Christopher Hitchens
Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

Christopher Hitchens
I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

Christopher Hitchens