# Christopher Hitchens

- Quotes: 205
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens

## Books

- [And Yet](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/and-yet.md) — 17 quotes
- [For the Sake of Argument](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/for-the-sake-of-argument.md) — 21 quotes
- [God Is Not Great](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/god-is-not-great.md) — 61 quotes
- [Hitch 22](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/hitch-22.md) — 93 quotes
- [Mortality](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/mortality.md) — 7 quotes
- [The Trial of Henry Kissinger](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/the-trial-of-henry-kissinger.md) — 3 quotes
- [Unacknowledged Legislation](https://www.leafyquotes.com/christopher-hitchens/unacknowledged-legislation.md) — 4 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked.

p. 381

> I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.
>
> If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.

p. 379

> I suspect that the hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which “sacrifices” are justified. With some part of my self, I still “feel,” but no longer really think, that humanity would be the poorer without this fantastically potent illusion. “A map of the world that did not show Utopia,” said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting.” I used to adore that phrase, but now reflect more upon the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest has led.

p. 420

> The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated, and by 1982 Communism had long passed the point where it needed anything more than the old equation of history with the garbage can.

p. 418

> Watching the Stalinist world succumb so pathetically, even gratefully, to its death wish in late 1989, when I happily witnessed the terminal twitches and spasms of the Hungarian and Romanian regimes, I had briefly celebrated the end of the totalitarian idea. In Hungary this had already died years previously, at least as Communism, and in Romania it had long before mutated into something grotesque and monstrous: Caligula sculpted in concrete. Milošević, too, exemplified this fusion of the cardboard-suited party-line populist and the hysterical nationalist demagogue.

p. 412

> Publicity means that actions are judged by reputations and not the other way about: I never wonder how it happens that mythical figures in religious history come to have fantastic rumors credited to their names.

p. 352

> But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.

p. 373

> I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart.

p. 410

> I have learned to distrust Utopias and to prefers satires.

p. 379

> I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. “Racist” is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted.

p. 398

> Over the course of the last decade, I have become vividly aware of a literally lethal challenge from the sort of people who deal in absolute certainty and believe themselves to be actuated and justified by a supreme authority. To have spent so long learning so relatively little, and then to be menaced in every aspect of my life by people who already know everything, and who have all the information they need…More depressing still, to see that in the face of this vicious assault so many of the best lack all conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous exaltation.

p. 421

> It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy’s children less they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy’s graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.

p. 372