Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence

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.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

Of course, I do everything for money.

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.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

In modern Greek history, there is a close relationship between national humiliation and political radicalization.

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

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

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

Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

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

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

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.

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.

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

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.

Religion fosters servility and solipsism.

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

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

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.

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