Christopher Hitchens Quotes

“A gentleman is never rude except on purpose – I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.”

“All of life is a wager.”

“Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension.

For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of Charles Darwin is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience.

Darwin’s thought was not taught in Germany; Darwinism was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were alike despised by the National Socialist regime.”

“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.”

“Beware of identity politics. I’ll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics.”

“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.”

“Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. 'All the News That's Fit to Print.' it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out.

I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me.

If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse.

You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.”

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”

“Everything everyone thinks they know about Mother Teresa is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.”

“Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals.

It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me.

Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16”

“For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race', unless I was permitted to put 'human'.

The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white', which is not even a color let alone a 'race', and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian', which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology.

Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black'.”

“George W. Bush is a man 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.”

“He said something that made it impossible to continue working for him. The exact words were 'You're fired'.”

“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”

“I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.”

“I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows:

"Money's scarce.
Times are hard.
Here's your f*cking
Xmas card."

I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities.

Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?”

“I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.”

“I'm very happy by myself if I've got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.”

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

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

“If you say you're a unifier, you expect and usually get applause.

I'm a divider. Politics is division by definition, if there was no disagreement there would be no politics.

The illusion of unity isn't worth having, and is anyways unattainable.”

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

“Los Angeles is 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.”

“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, it's indispensable.”

“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.”

“My hope is that literature can replace religion as the source of our ethics, without ceasing to be a pleasurable study and pursuit in its own right.”

“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time.

And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my *ss.”

“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”

“Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.”