110+ Christopher Hitchens Quotes On Religion, God And Death

Christopher Hitchens was an English-American author, journalist, and literary critic. He was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, and a variety of other publications. Hitchens was known for his controversial and often polemical style of writing, and his works were often critical of religion and politics. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Christopher Hitchens on religion, god, life.

Top 10 Christopher Hitchens Quotes

1. Alcohol is an excellent servant and a terrible master.
2. If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
3. 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.
4. Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.
5. High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
6. Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
7. The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.
8. Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.
9. Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.
10. Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

Christopher Hitchens Image Quotes

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

Christopher Hitchens Short Quotes

• The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
• Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
• To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'
• I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.
• That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
• Take the risk of thinking for yourself
• Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.
• The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.
• The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.
• Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Religion

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

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. — 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

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

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

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals. — 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

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

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About God

Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder. — Christopher Hitchens

MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. — 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

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

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

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

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

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge. — Christopher Hitchens

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with. — Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Life

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

We have no proof that Socrates ever existed. We only know from witnesses to his life that he did. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything down. It doesn't matter to me whether he did or not exist because we have his teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage. — Christopher Hitchens

All of life is a wager — 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

We know that our life is essentially tragic. I'm absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, "Why didn't you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind." — 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

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'. — 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

Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds? — Christopher Hitchens

It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind. — Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Death

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. — 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

We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we ­persist in self-­centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time. — 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

One can't live without fear, it's a question of what is your attitude towards fear? I'm afraid of a sordid death. I'm afraid that I will die in an ugly or squalid way, and cancer can be very vigorous in that respect. — Christopher Hitchens

The death toll is not nearly high enough... too many [jihadists] have escaped. — Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Love

Shepherds don't look after sheep because they love them - although I do think some shepherds like their sheep too much. They look after their sheep so they can, first, fleece them and second, turn them into meat. That's much more like the priesthood as I know it. — Christopher Hitchens

If I was told to sacrifice something to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said 'Yes I'll gut my kid to show my love of God.' — 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

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

A panel at a beautiful annual literary festival in Brazil, held in the almost Utopian coastal town of Parati, found me matched with Fernando Gabeira. This comparison reduced my own limited charisma value to something like zero: Gabeira has excelled at every cultural activity in Brazil. — Christopher Hitchens

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

For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. — Christopher Hitchens

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

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Kissinger

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray. — Christopher Hitchens

A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory. — Christopher Hitchens

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? — Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Jesus

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

Jesus, it is true, shows no personal interest in gain, but he does speak of treasure in heaven and even of mansions as an inducement to follow him. Is it not further true that all religions down the ages have shown a keen interest in the amassment of material goods in the real world? — Christopher Hitchens

Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance. — Christopher Hitchens

Jesus is Santa Claus for Adults. — Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About People

A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral. — Christopher Hitchens

It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque. — Christopher Hitchens

I say 'Merry Christmas' to people I don't know, or to people I know are Christians. I say 'Happy Hanukkah' to people I know to be or suspect to be Jewish. And I don't say 'Happy Kwanzaa,' because I think African Americans get enough insults all year round. — Christopher Hitchens

When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early. — 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

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

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

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose. — 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

If I could do just one thing, it would be to dissociate faith from virtue, now and for good, and to expose it for what it is, a servile weakness, a refuge in cowardice, and a willingness to follow, with credulity, people who are in the highest degree unscrupulous. — Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Write

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

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome. — 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 can't compose or play music; I'm not that fortunate. But I can write and I can talk and sometimes when I'm doing either of these things I realize that I've written a sentence or uttered a thought that I didn't absolutely know I had in me... until I saw it on the page or heard myself say it. — Christopher Hitchens

I've been writing a lot about a new form of Russian imperialism. Actually, Russian Orthodox imperialism. It's very little remarked that the cement, the political, ideological cement of the Russian regime now, communism having collapsed and imploded, is increasingly a confessional one. — Christopher Hitchens

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I'm talking to people. It doesn't always work, and one shouldn't always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation. — Christopher Hitchens

Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't. — Christopher Hitchens

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

It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.) — Christopher Hitchens

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words. — Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Feel

Here’s someone who says there’s no such thing, it’s all intelligent design. How sure am I of my own views? Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you’re bound to be okay, because you’re in the safely moral majority. — Christopher Hitchens

There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking. — Christopher Hitchens

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting. — Christopher Hitchens

I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice. — Christopher Hitchens

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

Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.' — Christopher Hitchens

If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings I'm still waiting to hear what your point is. — Christopher Hitchens

I think everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there's more to life than just matter. But I think it's very important to keep that under control and not to hand it over to be exploited by priests and shamans and rabbis and other riffraff. — Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Read

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

Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study. — Christopher Hitchens

The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister. — Christopher Hitchens

I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over. — Christopher Hitchens

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps. — Christopher Hitchens

I became a journalist because I didn't want to have to rely on the press for information... I only read it to make sure of whatever everyone else thinks is going on, because it's useful to know what people think is the news. — 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

Christopher Hitchens Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse. — Christopher Hitchens

The transformation of part of the northern part of this continent into "America" inaugurated a nearly boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation, and thus deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto, with or without the participation of those who wish they had never been born. — Christopher Hitchens

No possible future government in Kabul can be worse than the Taliban, and no thinkable future government would allow the level of Al Qaeda gangsterism to recur. So the outcome is proportionate and congruent with international principles of self-defense. — Christopher Hitchens

My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it 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

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. — Christopher Hitchens

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition. — 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

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape. — Christopher Hitchens

Margaret Thatcher has shown that there is power and dignity to be won by defying the status quo and the majority rather than by adapting to them. If the British left, which she froze into immobility like Medusa, could bring itself to learn from this, then we might not have to look upon her like again. — Christopher Hitchens

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough. — 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

I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. 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

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

It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression. — Christopher Hitchens

The best blended Scotch in the history of the world - which was also the favourite drink of the Iraqi Baath Party, as it still is of the Palestinian Authority and the Libyan dictatorship and large branches of the Saudi Arabian royal family - is Johnnie Walker Black. Breakfast of champions, accept no substitute. — 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

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

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

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

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed. — Christopher Hitchens

Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration. — Christopher Hitchens

He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things. — Christopher Hitchens

In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so. — 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

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives. — Christopher Hitchens

[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad. — 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

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

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

Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell. — Christopher Hitchens

We have millions and millions of North Korean children totally stunted in mind and body and will have to be dealt with at some point, who have been raised to believe that they live in a regime that is run by a god. — Christopher Hitchens

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life. — 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

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made. — Christopher Hitchens

The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example. — Christopher Hitchens

Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man. — 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

Religion fosters servility and solipsism. — Christopher Hitchens

It's [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren't even young and beautiful now. — Christopher Hitchens

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint. — Christopher Hitchens

Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock. — Christopher Hitchens

What they [the 9/11 attackers] abominate about 'the west', to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. — Christopher Hitchens

If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle. — Christopher Hitchens

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox. — Christopher Hitchens

The one unforgivable sin is to be boring. — Christopher Hitchens

Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of. — Christopher Hitchens

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

Life Lessons by Christopher Hitchens

1. Christopher Hitchens taught us to be fearless in our pursuit of truth and justice, regardless of the consequences.
2. He showed us that it is possible to question the status quo and challenge the accepted beliefs of society.
3. He encouraged us to think critically and to be willing to accept the uncomfortable truths that may be revealed.