Christopher Hitchens Quotes

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

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?

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

I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.

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

In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.

I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.

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.

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

The teachings of Christianity - from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary - these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.

By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And - most of all - what kind of designer or creator only chooses to "reveal" himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?

I'd like to prove to other people that it's not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer.

In my life, the only certainty is to be uncertain. I'm an unbeliever who believes in skepticism. I'm only sure about being unsure.

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

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

I'm dying, but so are you

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.

Quite interesting, North Korea is as if it's an entirely secular dictatorship. In North Korea you might think that was the case since it has an officially Communistic ideology, but it's not, it's the most religious state it's possible to imagine. It's actually two people who have been fused into one, maybe this is reminding you of something, there's the father and there's the son. It's one short of a trinity.

Human society is inconceivable unless words are to some extent bonds.

In one was, 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. But for precisely this reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.

As I've said before, you can be an atheist and anything you like.

Those who are determined to be 'offended' will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

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

If I could do just one thing, it would be to dissociate faith from virtue, now and for good, and to expose it for what it is, a servile weakness, a refuge in cowardice, and a willingness to follow, with credulity, people who are in the highest degree unscrupulous.

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

It's normally agreed that the question 'How are you?' doesn't put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer.

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

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.

What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.

Religion makes kind people say unkind things: "I must prove my faith, so mutilate the genitals of my children." They wouldn't do that if God didn't tell them to do so.

The stupider the regime the more intelligent the people get and the more humorous.

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