Christopher Hitchens Quotes

One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.

It's [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren't even young and beautiful now.

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

I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit.

To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t have a body, I am a body.

As is so often the case with pieces that appear in the 'Onion,' I honestly could not decide whether this was a clever hoax or not - the arguments were almost exactly as stupid as the real thing.

I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.

It [Obama's Nobel peace prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.

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.

I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

I am, I hope, never offensive by accident.

It's a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has God in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride.

Doubt, skepticism, innovation, and inquiry are the only means by which wonder, beauty, awe, and symmetry will be discovered.

Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.

Those who want to be offended don't have the right to try and close down the newspaper that offends them.

It's called faith because it's not knowledge.

We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.

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.

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

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.

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.

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

I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.

Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.

Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.

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

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

One can't indefinitely do for somebody what he is reluctant to do for himself.

I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

"Objective" means that, in a confrontation with the evidence, you would be willing to change your own mind.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

A good liar must have a good memory.

That most risky and volatile of all things a self-pitying majority.

If the Qur'an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.

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.