Christopher Hitchens Quotes

It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.

Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.

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.

For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.

At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.

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.

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

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

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

There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn't be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.

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.

I am a person of faith: I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all.

If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.

I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

Religion attacks us in our deepest integrity by saying we wouldn't be able to make a moral decision without it.

Friends call me Hitch. Maybe it can be turned into a 900-phone number. People would pay to talk to me.

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.

[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

Cheap booze is a false economy.

Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.

The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause.

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

You have to choose your future regrets.

Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.

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.

How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

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.

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.

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.

I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'

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.

Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.

I think that there is no supernatural dimension. The natural world is quite wonderful enough. The more we know about it, the much more wonderful it is than any supernatural proposition.

Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.

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

An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.