Christopher Hitchens

"To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid."

-Christopher Hitchens

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

-Christopher Hitchens

"There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise."

-Christopher Hitchens

"And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home."

-Christopher Hitchens

familyView Quote

"Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God."

-Christopher Hitchens

foodView Quote

"Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God."

-Christopher Hitchens

godView Quote

"Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it."

-Christopher Hitchens

godView Quote

"Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt."

-Christopher Hitchens

godView Quote

"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

goodView Quote

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

-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

"One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue."

-Christopher Hitchens

"The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply."

-Christopher Hitchens

"Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy."

-Christopher Hitchens

healthView Quote

"Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy."

-Christopher Hitchens

historyView Quote

"WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not."

-Christopher Hitchens

historyView Quote

"I think the materialist conception of history is valid."

-Christopher Hitchens

historyView Quote

"And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home."

-Christopher Hitchens

homeView Quote

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

-Christopher Hitchens

homeView Quote

"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

hopeView Quote

"A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope."

-Christopher Hitchens

hopeView Quote

"I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor."

-Christopher Hitchens

humorView Quote

"Of course, I do everything for money."

-Christopher Hitchens

moneyView Quote

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

-Christopher Hitchens

politicsView Quote

"The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself."

-Christopher Hitchens

politicsView Quote

"The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is."

-Christopher Hitchens

politicsView Quote

"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

powerView Quote

"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."

-Christopher Hitchens

relationshipView Quote

"I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny."

-Christopher Hitchens

relationshipView Quote

"Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy."

-Christopher Hitchens

"Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know."

-Christopher Hitchens

"Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments."

-Christopher Hitchens

"A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope."

-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

"I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again."

-Christopher Hitchens

"I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised."

-Christopher Hitchens

respectView Quote

"There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise."

-Christopher Hitchens

scienceView Quote

"If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women."

-Christopher Hitchens

societyView Quote

"Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R."

-Christopher Hitchens

technologyView Quote

"My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it."

-Christopher Hitchens

timeView Quote

"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

timeView Quote

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

-Christopher Hitchens

trustView Quote

"Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected."

-Christopher Hitchens

truthView Quote

"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

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

-Christopher Hitchens

"A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative."

-Christopher Hitchens

"There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar."

-Christopher Hitchens

"I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise."

-Christopher Hitchens

"If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women."

-Christopher Hitchens

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

-Christopher Hitchens

"To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?"

-Christopher Hitchens