The Best Christopher Hitchens quotes

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

Religion fosters servility and solipsism. — Christopher Hitchens

The thing about religion is that it’s the first and the worst. The worst because it’s the first. — Christopher Hitchens

Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred. — Christopher Hitchens

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

The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization. — Christopher Hitchens

I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world. — Christopher Hitchens

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know. — 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

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

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

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man–made. — 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

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

I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right. — 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

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

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them. — Christopher Hitchens

Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. — 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

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

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

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

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist. — 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

Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective. — 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

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. — Christopher Hitchens

The four most over–rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics. — Christopher Hitchens

For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them. — Christopher Hitchens

If you’ve led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it’s precisely the cancer that you’d expect to get. That’s a bit of a yawn. — Christopher Hitchens

I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply. — 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

Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a ‘first generation’ of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet. — Christopher Hitchens

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

History is a tragegy, not a morality tale. — Christopher Hitchens

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

You can’t have occupation and human rights. — Christopher Hitchens

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

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

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal. — Christopher Hitchens

Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self–abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules. — Christopher Hitchens

I don’t think there’s any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don’t know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement. — 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

Human beings are pattern–seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all. — 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

Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form. — Christopher Hitchens

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments. — Christopher Hitchens

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

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.’ Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture. — Christopher Hitchens

Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth — Christopher Hitchens

I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don’t think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn’t Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous? — Christopher Hitchens

Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever. — 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

For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time. — Christopher Hitchens

In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test. — Christopher Hitchens

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

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. — Christopher Hitchens

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed–in view of the overall shortage of time–by patience. — 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

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

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence. — Christopher Hitchens

All the time, I’ve felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn’t. — Christopher Hitchens

Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. — 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

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 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

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

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

The suicide–bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious. — 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

I don’t want them (religious followers) trying to inflict their belief on me. — Christopher Hitchens

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd. — Christopher Hitchens

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

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 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

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

I’ve been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world. — 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

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

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

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. — Christopher Hitchens

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can’t be English American. Why not? — Christopher Hitchens

One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. — Christopher Hitchens

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

With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day. — 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 people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it’s American or British interests involved. — Christopher Hitchens

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

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