Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Christopher Hitchens (Anglo-American Social Critic)

Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949–2011) was an English-born American journalist, polemicist, and social critic. A renowned advocate of atheism and a provocative thinker, he wrote books and articles with great wit, style, and originality. During a long career as a journalist and an articulate public debater, he gained a reputation for his biting critique and his amazing contrarian opinions about all kinds of topics.

Born in Portsmouth and educated at Oxford’s Balliol College, Hitchens got a job writing for the New Statesman, a leftist political publication in London. He eventually relocated to the United States, where he began a feature in The Nation magazine called “The Minority Report.” Later, Hitchens also wrote for The Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Express, the London Evening Standard, Newsday, The Atlantic, Vogue, and Slate. Hitchens became an American citizen in 2007, though he maintained his British citizenship.

Passionate and opinionated, Hitchens was an exceptionally prolific writer. He authored 11 books, co-authored six more, and had five collections of essays published. He wrote a book about George Orwell, Why Orwell Matters (2002) and the biographies of Thomas Jefferson (2005) and Thomas Paine (2007.) Hitchens shot into the limelight as an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq, about which, he wrote The Long Short War (2003.)

A self-described “essayist and a contrarian,” Hitchens carved out a reputation for his acerbic repartee and his scathing critiques of public figures. As an atheist, he frequently attacked religious figures. Hitchens called Mother Teresa “a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf.” In his extended essay, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995,) Hitchens censured her for indulging the rich and powerful “while preaching obedience and resignation to the poor.” Hitchens also launched an investigation into the career of Henry Kissinger, whom he accused of war crimes. In The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001,) Hitchens denounced Kissinger as a war criminal and argued that Kissinger’s foreign policy prolonged the Vietnam War, violated human rights and international law, and contributed to politically-inspired mass murders in Chile, Cambodia, East Timor, and other places.

Hitchens’s most successful book was God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007,) a disdainful indictment of religion. It put him together with Richard Dawkins as a figurehead of the so-called ‘New Atheist Movement’ and as a prominent adversary of the pious.

In June 2010, Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, of which he died—he was a celebrated drinker and smoker who had once declared, “Booze and fags are happiness.” While undergoing chemotherapy, he warned in a television interview, “I might as well say to anyone watching, if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so.”

Hitchens’s best-selling collections of essays include Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010,) Arguably (2011,) and Mortality (2012.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Christopher Hitchens

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.
Christopher Hitchens

Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.
Christopher Hitchens

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Christopher Hitchens

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
Christopher Hitchens

The search for nirvana, like the search for utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.
Christopher Hitchens

Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.
Christopher Hitchens

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends.
Christopher Hitchens

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

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
Christopher Hitchens
Topics: Terrorism

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.
Christopher Hitchens

The noble title of ‘dissident’ must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
Christopher Hitchens

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
Christopher Hitchens

The finest fury is the most controlled.
Christopher Hitchens

The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage.
Christopher Hitchens

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
Christopher Hitchens

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