Christopher Hitchens Quotes

There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.

Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

We have millions and millions of North Korean children totally stunted in mind and body and will have to be dealt with at some point, who have been raised to believe that they live in a regime that is run by a god.

With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

American author Mark Twain, while viewed as liberal and non-judgmental, did at times demonstrate both these characteristics. While his reasons for detesting the Christian faith are unclear, they seem to have been profound and deep-rooted. Having lambasted the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, in a later quote he referred to the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print."

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

Unlike other countries, it was founded on written proclamations. America is an ideal as well as a republic. Its documents are open to revisions. They're works in progress. There's an invitation to participate.

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things because to demystify supposedly 'holy text dictated by god' and show that they are man made and what you have to show [is] there internal inconsistencies and absurdities. One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority... it is an indispensable thing people can call it blasphemy if they like, but if they call it that they have to assume there is something to be blasphemed - some divine work, well I don't accept the premise.

Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.

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

America was not interventionist enough, which, of course, did mean a bit of a breach with old comrades on the left. I felt the international left in the countries concerned took the same position as I did. So, in my view, it's the left that's become reactionary and isolationist and parochial.

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.

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.

Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.

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

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

MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

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

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries .

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

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.

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

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

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!

Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.

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

I don’t have a body, I am a body.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.

The best blended Scotch in the history of the world - which was also the favourite drink of the Iraqi Baath Party, as it still is of the Palestinian Authority and the Libyan dictatorship and large branches of the Saudi Arabian royal family - is Johnnie Walker Black. Breakfast of champions, accept no substitute.

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy 'legacy' is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and "torch-passing" rhetoric in general.

Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.

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.

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.'

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

The creation story is ridiculous garbage. And has given us a completely false picture of our origin as a species and the origins of the cosmos. If you want a good mythical story it would be the life of Socrates.

Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.