Christopher Hitchens

“It is a settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute. The United States, while they wish for war with no nation, will buy peace with none.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion attacks us in our deepest integrity by saying we wouldn’t be able to make a moral decision without it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The finest fury is the most controlled.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I don’t have a body, I am a body.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Take the risk of thinking for yourself.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ 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

“I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response – which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up – contains almost all that needs to be said on this point.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being “not even wrong.” Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt, and I claim that right.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I don’t say things like “the grace of God.” All that’s white noise to me, not because I’m an intellectual. For many people, it’s gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It’s often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven’t been made.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Those who want to be offended don’t have the right to try and close down the newspaper that offends them.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child’s social origin with its physical well-being.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“No one can deny, in face of the evidence, that it is easy, given military power, to produce a population of fanatical lunatics. It would be equally easy to produce a population of sane and reasonable people, but many governments do not wish to do so, since such people would fail to admire the politicians who are at the head of these governments.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Cheap booze is a false economy.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I want to live my life taking the risk – all the time – that I don’t know anything like-enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom… Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world’s monotheisms. It builds upon its primitive Jewish and Christian predecessors, selecting a chunk here and a shard there, and thus if these fall, it partly falls also.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It’s a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has God in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Will an Iraq war make our Al Qaeda problem worse? Not likely.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I’m very happy by myself – I’m lucky in that way – 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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that ‘issue’ I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I’m a member of no party. I have no ideology. I’m a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that’s all around us.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I am a person of faith: I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“Reason is the Devil’s harlot, who can do nought but slander and harm whatever God says and does. – MARTIN LUTHER.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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

“If one must have faith in order to believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding and has confronted us with findings far more “miraculous” and “transcendent” than any theology.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion gets its morality from us. We don’t get our morality from religion.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Those who naively credit Gandhi with a conscientious or consistent pacifism might wish to ask if this did not amount to letting the Japanese imperialists do his fighting for him.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The atheist proposition is the following – most of the time – it may not be said that there is no god; it may be said that there is no reason to think that there is one.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it’s a form of love, and it deserves our respect for that reason.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It is a tragic and potentially lethal irony that those who most despise science and the method of free inquiry should have been able to pilfer from it and annex its sophisticated products to their sick dreams.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Jesus is Santa Claus for Adults.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator – that’s beyond my conceit.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism and liberal secular democracy, even less do I want to engage with those who are incapable of recognizing the basic moral distinction between premeditated mass murder and unintentional killing.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It is supposed to be an axiom of “Western” civilization that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as “order.” ~ 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

“In our world, surely the worst thing anyone can say is; ‘No further inquiry is needed. You’ve already got all you need to know.’ It is the most sinister and dangerous thing.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“My political life has been informed by the view that if there was any truth to religion there wouldn’t really be any need for politics.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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 ass.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“If you can charm everyone it means you don’t care about anyone in particular.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language – always the language – was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion fosters servility and solipsism.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.” ~ 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

“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

“The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for 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

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It’s amazing how relaxing it is not to claim you know more than you do. I’m surprised that those who claim to speak in the name of god don’t take more advantage of this relief.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“Its a matter of principle. If Jews born in Brooklyn have a right to a state in Palestine then Palestinians born in Jerusalem have a right to a state in Palestine.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“There is an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of “little guy” or “silent majority” rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I’m not afraid of being dead, that’s to say there’s nothing to be afraid of. I won’t know I’m dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I’m alive in any way at all, that’ll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“One can’t indefinitely do for somebody what he is reluctant to do for himself.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.” ~ 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

“Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled…” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“There is an old Belfast joke about the man stopped at a roadblock and asked his religion. When he replies that he is an atheist he is asked, “Protestant or Catholic atheist?” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Exceptional claims, require exceptional evidence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Today I want to puke when I hear the word ‘radical’ applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.” ~ 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

“What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The curse of Abraham continues to poison Hebron, but the religious warrant for blood sacrifice poisons our entire civilization.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich st.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ 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

“Go too far outside “the box,” of course, and you will encounter a vernacular that is much less “tolerant.” Here, the key words are “fanatic,” “troublemaker,” “misfit” or “malcontent.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.” ~ 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

“The fact is: It’s true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“There’s no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified there. It’s only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“This is a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way.” ~ 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

“Redemption is promised at the low price of surrender of your critical faculties.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I could be spending time looking through a telescope or into a microscope and finding out the most extraordinary, wonderful things, but people say faith can move mountains. Faith in what, by the way? You haven’t said.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“No child’s behind left.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Most of the utopian community ideas actually are religious. They’re based more on the idea of the monastery than the commune.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Doubt, skepticism, innovation, and inquiry are the only means by which wonder, beauty, awe, and symmetry will be discovered.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ 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

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“In one way, 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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism .” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ 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

“All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don’t know what they are talking about.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“You notice how liberals keep saying, ‘If only Islam would have a Reformation’ – it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“You have to choose your future regrets.” ~ 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

“You don’t say ‘they all do it’ unless you know you’ve been doing it too.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be determined.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“Richard Dawkins may have phrased it most pungently when he argued that everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god – from Ra to Shiva – in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can’t.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“Religion poisons everything.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Created sick, and then commanded to be well.” This is one of the first, easiest, and most obvious of the satirical maxims that eventually lay waste to the illusion of faith.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It’s a better tradition for people who think for themselves and who don’t pray in aid of any supernatural authority. That’s what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I think the cultural task is to separate our impulses and needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden’s carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I am, I hope, never offensive by accident.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of ‘discrimination.’ The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.’” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.” ~ 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

“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“That most risky and volatile of all things a self-pitying majority.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I am so made that I cannot believe.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The only known cure for poverty is emancipation of women.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can’t make old friends.” ~ 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

“I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Almost all religions from Buddhism to Islam feature either a humble prophet or a prince who comes to identify with the poor, but what is this if not populism? It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.” ~ 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

“If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It’s 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

“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

“If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?” ~ 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

“The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head – chemo-brain they call it. It’s awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“There are also people who say it’s God’s curse on me that I should have it near my throat because that was the organ of blasphemy which I used for so many years. I’ve used many other organs to blaspheme as well if it comes to that.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“All of life is a wager.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It is a deformity in some ‘radicals’ to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or ‘real’ one. Many a purge or show trial has got merrily under way in this manner.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.” ~ 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

“It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.” ~ 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

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

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Who are your favourite 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

“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.” ~ 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

“Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There’s no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

“I’m dying, but so are you.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“I’m not as I was but at this present moment I have to say, I feel very envious of someone who’s young and active and starting out in the argument. Just think of the extraordinary things that are waiting to be known.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“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.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.” ~ Christopher Hitchens