Christopher Hitchens Quotes

"I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do."

"There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument."

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

"Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint."

"A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me."

"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."

"I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either."

"Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties."

"No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis."

"I like surprises."

"It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder."

"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.'"

"The violence in the Bible is appalling."

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

"The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation."

"Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts."

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

"Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars."

"I don't have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I've been too lucky and that I'm over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated."

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

"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."

"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."

"Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded."

"If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument."