1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Quotes
page 2

Christopher Eric Hitchens was an Anglo-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on politics, literature and religion. A staple of public discourse, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded intellectual and a controversial public figure. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, Free Inquiry and Vanity Fair.

Having long described himself as a social democrat, a Marxist, and an anti-totalitarian, he began to break with the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Satanic Verses controversy, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton and the antiwar movement's opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. His support of the Iraq War separated him further. While he came to reject socialism, he still identified as a Marxist and believed in both the dialectic and the materialist conception of history. His writings include critiques of public figures such as Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Diana, Princess of Wales. He was the elder brother of the conservative journalist and author Peter Hitchens. He advocated the separation of church and state.

As an antitheist he regarded the concept of a god or supreme being as a totalitarian belief that impedes individual freedom. He argued that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of informing ethics and defining codes of conduct for human civilization. The dictum "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" has become known as Hitchens's razor.

✵ 13. April 1949 – 15. December 2011   •   Other names Christopher Eric Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens photo
Christopher Hitchens: 305   quotes 11   likes

Christopher Hitchens Quotes

“For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.”

Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

Friendship

“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 Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

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

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Dembski, 18/11/2010 ( closing remarks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwgYYxfpPC0)
2010s, 2010
Context: When Socrates was sentenced to death, for his philosophical investigations and his blasphemy for challenging the Gods of the city and he accepted his death. He did say "well, if we're lucky perhaps I'll be able to hold a conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too", in other words that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble and what is pure and what is true can always go on. Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that is the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don't know, but I do know that it is the conversation I want to have while I am still alive. Which means that for me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having. 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. I wouldn't have it any other way. And I urge you to look at those of you that tell you (at your age) that that you are dead until you believe as they do. (What a terrible thing to be telling to children.) And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don't think of that as a gift, think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside no matter how tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

Wisdom , Truth , Beauty , Way

“What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography

Way

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”

Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

Pain , Memory

“The most educated person in the world now has to admit-- I shall not say confess-- that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

World , Education , Personality

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

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

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

Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: 2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012), p. 91.

“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
Country

“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 Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

Falseness

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

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

People

“When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.”

Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“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

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Faith

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

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

Idea , Happiness

“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

World , Motivation

“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

Girl , Idea , Time

“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&t=13m50s
2010s, 2011

God

“Cheap booze is a false economy.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

Falseness

“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

Books , Memory , Parting , Personality

“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.

Stupidity , Silence , Time

“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

Personality

“[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

Life , Personality

“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
Hunger , Truth , Search

“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

Education

“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

Nature

“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

“The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.”

Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Law

“You can't have occupation and human rights.”

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

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Parting

“A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful.”

Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

Hurt

“One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.”

Christopher Hitchens

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html
2000s, 2004

Hope , Problem , Time , Success

“A people that began to think as citizens rather than subjects might transcend underdevelopment on their own. Inalienable human right is unique in that it needs no superhuman guarantee; no 'fount' except itself. Only servility requires the realm (suggestive word) of illusion. Illusions, of course, cannot be abolished. But they can and must be outgrown.”

Christopher Hitchens

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

People , Thinking

“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.”

Christopher Hitchens

2009-10-12
Morning Joe
MSNBC, quoted in * 2009-10-12
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/12/christopher-hitchens-pans_n_317373.html
Christopher Hitchens Pans Obama's Nobel Prize
Huffington Post
Nicholas
Graham
2000s, 2009

Peace , Hope

“If most of those who took part in this one-dimensional debate were honest with themselves, they would admit that they do not in principle believe that the United States can do any good overseas for anyone but the American government, its armed forces, or privileged American elites.”

Christopher Hitchens

1994
December 1993/January
http://www.bostonreview.net/world/hitchens-never-trust-imperialists
Never Trust Imperialists (Especially When They Turn Pacifist)
Boston Review
1990s

Parting

“At the moment, it’s very clear to me the most toxic form that religion takes is the Islamic form… The whole idea of wanting to end up with Sharia with a religion-governed state — a state of religious law — and the best means of getting there is Jihad, Holy War, that Muslims have a special right to feel aggrieved enough to demand this is absolute obscene wickedness and I think their religion is nonsense, in its entirety.”

Christopher Hitchens

http://www.inquisitr.com/1735647/christopher-hitchens-islam-comments-resurface-after-charlie-hebdo-its-the-most-depraved-religion/
2010s, 2010

War , Religion , Law , Feeling

“The next stop on Reagan's European tour after Bitburg was Madrid, where he made a speech in which he said, "I know there's been a lot of controversy about the United States and Spain at that time, indeed some Americans once came here to fight in the civil war." He said, "But the thing is," said Reagan, "they were on the wrong side." In other words a conscious choice, a conscious and deliberate remark showing that the sympathy for fascism, not accidental, not anecdotal, not a slip of the tongue, but something bred-in-the-bone; and, I think, also worth recalling.”

Christopher Hitchens

1990s

War , Thinking , Time , Fight

“The progress that's made … in any argument or in any discussion is by confrontation. That's a dialectical fact. People say "oh let's have less heat and more light," fatuously. There's only one source of light. It happens to be heat.”

Christopher Hitchens

May 4, 2008 TimesTalk http://www.nytimes.whsites.net/talk/podcasts.html.
2000s, 2008

People , Light

“It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' "… In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.”

Christopher Hitchens

2010s, 2011

Fools , Thinking , Learning

“Many of the points made by the antiwar movement have been consciously assimilated by the Pentagon and its lawyers and advisers. Precision weaponry is good in itself, but its ability to discriminate is improving and will continue to improve. 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

2002-09-08
Its' a Good Time for War
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/globe_stories/090802_hitchens_2.htm: On the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
2000s, 2002

“Well if you reduce religion to social work, so does USAID produce…do all that. Actually, a secular organization, actually rather more convincingly. Most of the great philanthropist of the united states have been atheists…doesn't prove that atheism is correct.”

Christopher Hitchens

2000s, 2007
Source: Hannity's America, May 13, 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created

Religion

“Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in crime are now in jail, or are awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited. His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the philosopher Anacharsis, who mantained that laws were like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.”

Christopher Hitchens

[The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2002, 1859846319, 46240330, [E840.8.K58 H58 2001]]
2000s, 2002

Justice , Law , Strong , Time

“Hannity-"I am a believer. I believe in a creator." Hitchens-"And that's where it stops, or you think this creator cares about you too?"”

Christopher Hitchens

Hannity's America, May 13, 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created
2000s, 2007

Thinking

“In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.”

Christopher Hitchens

I.
2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012)

Life

“The "line of the day" among administration spokesmen, confronted by masses of destitute and terrified refugees and solid reports of the mass execution of civilians, is to say that "we expected this to happen." They did? (They never told anyone.) If they want to avoid being indicted for war crimes themselves, these "spokesmen" had better promise us that they were lying when they said that.”

Christopher Hitchens

1990s

War , Lying

“I doubt that even if this evidence could be upgraded to 100 per cent it would persuade the sort of people who go on self-appointed missions of mediation to Baghdad. These people further fail to see that governments now have a further responsibility to their citizens — namely to see that something is done to prevent future assaults on civilisation.”

Christopher Hitchens

"We Must Fight Iraq" http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12227453&method=full&siteid=50143, Daily Mirror (2002-09-25): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2002, We Must Fight Iraq (2002)

People , Future