Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Enjoy the top 1078 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Christopher Hitchens.

“It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.”
— Christopher Hitchens —

“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.”

— 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

“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

“The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.”

— 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

“Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.”

— 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

“I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.”

— 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

“He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean-even if it did build muscle-whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period ... the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.”

— Christopher Hitchens

If the counsel of the peaceniks had been followed, Kuwait would today be the nineteenth province of Iraq. Bosnia would be a trampled and cleansed province of Greater Serbia, Kosovo would have been emptied of most of its inhabitants, and the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan. Yet nothing seems to disturb the contented air of moral superiority of those that intone the "peace movement".

— Christopher Hitchens

“The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things ... one of the beginnings of the human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority, its indispensable”

— Christopher Hitchens

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery.

— Christopher Hitchens

If only religion were an opiate. No known narcotic rots the brain so fast.

— Christopher Hitchens

“It's only when you have grazed on the lower slopes of your own ignorance and begun to understand the great vistas of nonknowledgeï»¿ that you have, that you can claim to have been educated at all.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like 'a plantation,' adding in a significant tone of voice that 'you know what I mean ... '
She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently).”

— Christopher Hitchens

“One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in the White House purely as the result of a relationship with a man, and not at all a quixotic outsider who represents the aspirations of an 'out' group, let alone a whole sex or gender.”

— Christopher Hitchens

At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.

— Christopher Hitchens

“Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.”

— Christopher Hitchens

People keep saying, "God is in the details". He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.

— Christopher Hitchens

“We make no saint of Thomas Jefferson-we leave the mindless business of canonization and the worship of humans to the fanatics-but aware as we are of his many crimes and contradictions we say with confidence that his memory and example will endure long after the moral pygmies who try to blot out his name have been forgotten.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“My looks by then had in any case declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape-Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this-the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.'
I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year').”

— Christopher Hitchens

“The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn't precisely one of the things that engages you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“In some cases-most notably the Christian-one revelation is apparently not sufficient, and needs to be reinforced by successive apparitions, with the promise of a further but ultimate one to come. In other cases, the opposite difficulty occurs and the divine instruction is delivered, only once, and for the final time, to an obscure personage whose lightest word then becomes law. Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory. It could also follow that only one of them is authentic, but in the first place this seems dubious and in the second place it appears to necessitate religious war in order to decide whose revelation is the true one.”

— Christopher Hitchens

This is what I have been telling writing classes for years. You must feel not that you want to but that you have to.

— Christopher Hitchens

In a time when both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.

— Christopher Hitchens

The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother

— Christopher Hitchens

But here are wine and beautiful young girls, Be wise and hide your sorrows in their curls, Dive as you will in life's mysterious sea, You shall not bring us any better pearls.

— Christopher Hitchens

“The argument about ethics and morality will have to go on in a post-religious society, just as it had to go on when religion was regnant and was often ordering good people to agree to evil things such as torture, slavery, or cruelty to children.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“The enormous condescension of posterity was the magnificent phrase employed by E. P. Thompson to remind us that we must never belittle the past popular struggles and victories (as well as defeats) that we are inclined to take for granted.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“But the acknowledging of one God, eternal, infinite, and omnipotent, may more easily be derived, from the desire men have to know the causes of natural bodies, and their several virtues, and operations; than from the fear of what was to befall them in time to come. For he that from any effect he seeth come to pass, should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and from thence to the cause of that cause, and plunge himself profoundly in the pursuit of causes; shall at last come to this, that there must be, as even the heathen philosophers confessed, one first mover; that is, a first, and an eternal cause of all things; which is that which men mean by the name of God: and all this without thought of their fortune; the solicitude whereof, both inclines to fear, and hinders them from the search of the causes of other things; and thereby gives occasion of feigning of as many gods, as there be men that feign them.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“To read of the unrelenting coarseness and brutality of the boy's father is lowering to the spirit, as is the shame he felt at his mother's reputation for unchastity.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Before Admiral Guzzetti traveled to Washington to see Kissinger in October 1976, Hill had met him and told him that "murdering priests and dumping forty-seven bodies in the street in one day could not be seen in the context of defeating the terrorists quickly; on the contrary such acts were probably counterproductive. What the USG [United States Government] hoped was that the GOA [Government of Argentina] could soon defeat terrorists, yes, but as nearly as possible within the law." Even this admonition, which might be seen by some as containing a loophole or two, was considered too harsh by Kissinger. Guzzetti

— 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. It's not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It's immoral.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

— Christopher Hitchens

It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.

— Christopher Hitchens

Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.

— Christopher Hitchens

“Exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn't so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside the baggy garments.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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