Christopher Hitchens Quotes

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

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.

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

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

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.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

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