Christopher Hitchens Quotes

I'd rather sink with a bad theory than swim with muddy pragmatism.

In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.

I don't compromise my principles for politics.

His major flaw may be that he is a prisoner of his own convictions…. He refuses to endorse laws with which he disagrees.

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong.

A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.

Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention.

Gawker started out speaking the truth to power, and then it became about bullying anyone who didn't conform to their social justice orthodoxy. They wanted to inflict pain on people with no platform simply for the sake of inflicting pain.

Growing up with my father was like growing up with Jeremy Corbyn. He still hasn't rejoined the party; it's not left wing enough for him.

Fundamentalists are crazy. They're the real world equivalent to the evil geniuses of our spy fiction and our superhero comics. They want to mold the world into a specific shape that they really believe in, and if you don't believe in that, if you can't relate to that, it just seems crazy.

Showing your own righteousness by pointing out someone's unrighteousness, the race to the bottom, the transgressions getting smaller and smaller and smaller but still treated with the same level of intolerance and condemnation, all of that stuff, even as I say it I am talking about Twitter but I am thinking about Westboro.

Heartless zealotry, whether from the religious right or from the teachers' union on the left, is always troubling.

I'm not going to back down from my controversial positions. If I were to do that, my base would be gone. And so my strategy is just, continue to speak the truth, even if it is controversial.

My style is confrontational: when I see evil, I want to remove it right away.

If somebody else thinks something that you don't believe in, just think they're wrong and you're right and keep going. That's pretty much the way I always think.

I'm alone and outgunned, scared and inexperienced, but I'm right.

Am I self-righteous? Why not? It's not like I can count on you to be righteous for me.

God has nothing to say to the self-righteous.

A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics ... the more you are in the right (and) everybody else should be bullied into thinking otherwise.

Churchgoers feel righteous, responsible, and obedient to God's will. They view anyone unlike themselves as devoid of values, and therefore unworthy of God's love. By denying God to all those who have strayed from the path of righteousness, the devout are unwittingly taking on themselves a role that belongs only to God.

Oh sirs, deal with sin as sin, and speak of heaven and hell as they are, and not as if you were in jest.

Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.

I should say that all compromise is a "stepping down" of the Truth, is trying to reduce something which cannot be reduced, and that for anyone who has understood life these compromises are impossible.

Being consistent meant not departing from convictions already formulated; being a leader meant making other persons accept these convictions. It was a narrow track, and a one-way, but a person might travel a considerable distance on it. A number of dictators have.