Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English intellectual, polemicist, and socio-political critic, who expressed himself as an author, orator, essayist, and columnist. He wrote, co-wrote, edited, or co-edited over 30 books, including five essays on culture, politics, and literature. He took American citizenship in 2007. These Christopher Hitchens quotes will motivate you.
Best Christopher Hitchens Quotes
- “Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “The gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Here is my challenge. Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first – I have been asking it for some time – awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “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 mammals. 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. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us – waking and sleeping – who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, thought crime, just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick, as apparently we are – and then order us, on pain of eternal torture to be well again.
To demand this, to wish this to be true is to wish to live as an abject slave.” ~ Christopher Hitchens - “My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. 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. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “[Religion] attacks us in our deepest integrity – the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we would not know an evil, wicked act from a decent human act without divine permission, without divine authority or without, even worse, either the fear of a divine punishment or the hope of a divine reward. It strips us of the right to make our own determination, as all humans always have, about what is and what is not a right human action.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things… one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “People are frightened of death, and the central lie of all religion is that there’s a cure for this and an exception we’ve made in your own case: an eternal life offered if you make the right propitiations and the right abjections. Well, I’m sorry. I think that it’s the height of immorality to lie to people like that. That’s why [religion] survives.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“Take the risk of thinking for yourself” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Shepherds don’t look after sheep because they love them – although I do think some shepherds like their sheep too much. They look after their sheep so they can, first, fleece them and second, turn them into meat. That’s much more like the priesthood as I know it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “I’m an atheist. I’m not neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet – who was only another male mammal – is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens Quotes
- “In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Here’s someone who says there’s no such thing, it’s all intelligent design. How sure am I of my own views? Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you’re bound to be okay because you’re in the safely moral majority.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “In one way, traveling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “We have no proof that Socrates ever existed. We only know from witnesses to his life that he did. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything down. It doesn’t matter to me whether he did or not exist because we have his teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
