Christopher Hitchens quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Christopher Hitchens on Wise Famous Quotes.

The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.

With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven's sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork.

As Bertie Wooster once phrased it, they experienced some difficulty in detecting the bluebird.

(An astrologer of a London tabloid was once fired by means of a letter from his editor which began, "As you will no doubt have foreseen.")

Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but ...
Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)

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.

I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not put together like the other chaps.

The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can't be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.

The life of an oppositionist is supposed to be difficult.) I

All of life is a wager

Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power.

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

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

Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.

These are the rewards of maturity, to be enjoyed only as we decline. We

We become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang.

The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no
politics like antipolitics

Chemotherapy isn't good for you.

In modern Greek history, there is a close relationship between national humiliation and political radicalization.

justified in the name of "security" like almost every cowardly idiocy before and since,

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.

It [Obama's Nobel peace prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.

Divine permission, given to people who think they have god on their side, enables actions that a morally normal unbeliever would not contemplate.

Those who want to be offended don't have the right to try and close down the newspaper that offends them.

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

Hegel said that history was the story of freedom becoming conscious of itself.

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

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

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

Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.

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.

Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker.

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.

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.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself , much more happiness , truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way ..

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

In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.

(One of the great emancipating results of genomics is to show that all "racial" and color differences are recent, superficial, and misleading.)

I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me,

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

For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.

Virtuous behavior by a believer is no proof at all of - indeed is not even an argument for - the truth of his belief.

The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.

New forms of the artistic register are one of the infallible signs of an authentic moment.

The literal mind can never understand the ironic mind.

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.

From a plurality of prime movers, the monotheists have bargained it down to a single one. They are getting ever nearer to the true, round figure.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

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

I personally want to "do" death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.

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

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

I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.

Internationalism is the highest form of patriotism.

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

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

A bit of a stomach give a chap a position in society.

The brief answer is that I have become inured without becoming indifferent.

What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?

I began the project of judging Mother Teresa's reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.

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

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

No moral person would do such a thing unless they thought it was divinely warranted.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.

There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.

The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother

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

It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true.

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

Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

And showed him to be a villa-dwelling dependent and not an ascetic cave-dwelling guerrilla.

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

The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.

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

History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.

Redemption is promised at the low price of surrender of your critical faculties.

If you can talk, you can write.

Nose-hairs gone: runny nostrils. Constipation and diarrhea alternating

I have a strong constitution which has served me quite well, though if I hadn't had such a strong one I might have led a more healthy life perhaps.

Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward.

The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.

Of course, I do everything for money.

I shall simply say that those who offer false consolation are false friends.

Arguments that explain everything ... explain nothing

How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.

The awareness that the distinction between "over here" and "over there," or between "home" and "abroad" is often a false one has never left me.

all children are born into a losing struggle with death

Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.

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

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

By the way, if you knew how you sounded when you hissed, you wouldn't do it: you sound like such berks when you do that.

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

[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.

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