Christopher Hitchens: Trending quotes

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Christopher Hitchens: 610 quotes11 likes

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

Christopher Hitchens

“The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.”

Christopher Hitchens book The Missionary Position

Source: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“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

Christopher Hitchens vs. Barry Brummett, 04/06/2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjSMmRFHaJM&amp;t=13m50s <br class="br">2010s, 2011

“Cheap booze is a false economy.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.”

Christopher Hitchens

“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.”

Christopher Hitchens book Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“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”

Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: 2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
Context: 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.

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

Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“You have to choose your future regrets.”

Christopher Hitchens

“There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.”

Christopher Hitchens

“Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.”

Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

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

Christopher Hitchens

Source: The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“In a state of conflict or a conflicted state.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

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

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Arguably: Selected Essays