Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.

Stupidity took me pretty far.

Most of the women in Greek tragedies have their fates predetermined. The gods dictate that such and such will happen to them, and everything they predict comes true. Not Medea.

I don't believe in acting teachers for me, so it's God's joke that he gave me a best friend who's an acting teacher.

The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

I truly believe that if you think something's stupid, that might mean it's actually good.

That is the gods' work, spinning threads of death through the lives of mortal men, an all to make a song for those to come.

Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies.

See now, how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly.

We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.

This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world. And Fate always wins.

And sing to those that hold the vital shears; And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound.

Destiny has a constant passion for the incongruous.

He saw that it was an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid.

Our fate is something which exists outside ourselves, and which once revealed expresses the meaning of our lives. Apart, however, from soothsayers who claim to have a means of foretelling exactly what will befall us, this kind of fate is only normally revealed after a life has ended. Only then can the meaning of that life be understood.

He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.

Sceptics are yet the most credulous.

I don't think that anything happens by coincidence... No one is here by accident... Everyone who crosses our path has a message for us. Otherwise they would have taken another path, or left earlier or later. The fact that these people are here means that they are here for some reason".

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

I held out the painting of the cat and the snake. “It’s a cat and a snake,” Thoth said. Thank you, god of wisdom. You placed it for us to find, didn’t you? You’re trying to give us some sort of clue.” “Who, me?” Just kill him, Horus said. Shut up, I said. At least kill the guitar.

Men, when their actions succeed not as they would, are always ready to impute the blame thereof to heaven, so as to excuse their own follies.

If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!

Because it's his bad luck to be the best.

And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.

Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.