Christopher Hitchens Quotes

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.

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

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

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

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil

Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things… one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

Nothing optional — from homosexuality to adultery — is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.

[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.