The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.


Christopher Hitchens

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Without anything being said, there were no women at our lunches. Not that we were talking pussy. Or ...
CRAIG BROWN
...to experience a furious disillusionment with ‘conventional’ politics, a bit young to be so cy...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Where the law ends tyranny begins.
HENRY FIELDING
Society cannot exist without law. Law is the bond of society: that which makes it, that which preser...
JOSEPH P. BRADLEY
Where law ends, tyranny begins.
WILLIAM PITT
Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins
JOHN LOCKE
Where law ends, tyranny begins
WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER
If there is a heaven, like Saul of Tarsus, Christopher Hitchens is in it. If there is a hell, like L...
BOBBY W. MILLER
Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY
Of all injustice, that is the greatest which goes under the name of law; and of all sorts of tyranny...
L. ESTRANGE
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name o...
CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name o...
CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU
There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the na...
MONTESQUIEU
There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the na...
CHARLES DE SECONDAT
You can pass any law you like to make 'criminals' of those you don't like and then justify it with w...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
The supreme law of the land is the Great Spirit's law, not man's law.
AMERICAN INDIAN PROVERB
It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form i...
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual for...
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form...
JAMES F. COOPER
The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and ...
JOHN ADAMS
It is what it is, it is what you make it.
JAMES DURBIN
It is not possible to make a bad law. If is is bad, it is not a law.
CARRY NATION
A law is not a law without coercion behind it.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, n...
TONY BLAIR
Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and this I know, my lords: that ...
WILLIAM PITT
A law is valuable not because it is law, but because there is right in it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
The Law is hard, but it is the Law.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not...
MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE
In a world without the law of God, you have chaos, oppression, tyranny, and everyone doing what is r...
RANDALL TERRY
I [Christopher Hitchens] moved into Mart's sock—where you lived was your 'sock.' Your rug was your...
CRAIG BROWN
Don't take security in the false refuge of consensus.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
That statement is totally absurd. Look, all we are saying is what the law always has said: A city ha...
JAKE MOORE
I am Happy and satisfied with what I am. 10000 will take me wrong, 1000 will go against me, 100 will...
NEHA KOTHARI
If our mind was an ocean then every now and then we would have the perfect storm happening in it.Gar...
GARY F EVANS...
It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has no equality. Its sovereign law is subord...
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
What they're complaining about is the law. It's not fair. We're not happy about it. But it's the law...
LAURA STROMBERG
Nature’s law is such that it metes out its justice to everyone as they deserve by giving each pers...
ANUJ SOMANY
Every living being, from ants to whales, has a right to live and die in accordance with the law of t...
CHANDRABABU V.S.
Any change one effect on his natural being with a purpose would definitely end up revealing his hypo...
CHANDRABABU V.S.
The constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a l...
JOHN MARSHALL
The bankruptcy law was not intended to attack physicians but it is the law of unintended consequence...
AARON FARMER
I regret that I wasn't more successful with my marriages, but it is what it is.
TED TURNER
To stand on the
brink of what is coming, feeling eager, optimistic anticipation—with no feeli...
ASK AND IT IS GIVEN
Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the...
LAO TZU
There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law...
EDMUND BURKE
There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law...
EDMUND BURKE
The law is not a "light" for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The...
ROBERT BOLT
The law is not a light for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The l...
ROBERT BOLT
For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and ...
JOE BIDEN
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is ...
EMMA GOLDMAN
Fair housing is not an option - it is the law.
CARL HARRIS
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
EDMUND BURKE
Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of...
BRUCE COVILLE
The law of grab is the primal law of infancy
ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL
It's not like there's a law against flying."

"Yes there is. The law of gravity.
LAINI TAYLOR
The Law is the Law!
DAVID PRATT
Sometimes the scandal is not what law was broken, but what the law allows.
EDWARD SNOWDEN
Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason - the law which...
EDWARD COKE
Immigration law is civil law; law enforcement never enforces civil law.
ANGELICA SALAS
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the st...
JOHN LOCKE
I'm not an Emontional, but how???
I live with the thought that "Nothing can be returned, it has...
DEYTH BANGER
In the absence of law, winner is the law maker.
TOBA BETA
Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.
EDMUND BURKE
Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearf...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment...
EDWIN MEESE
Law in Ukraine is not black and white; it is shades of gray.
BRANDON WEBB
Law of nature is not a confinement to freedom. It safeguards the subsistence.
JONATHAN CHEN
Where the law is uncertain there is no law.
PROVERB
If the law supposes that, said Mr. Bumble, the law is a assa idiot. If thats the eye of the law, the...
CHARLES DICKENS
It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we ...
FELIX FRANKFURTER
I have had to make a decision I may not agree with, but I am required to follow the letter of the la...
CHARLES T. CANADY
There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into...
JAMES BAMFORD
It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand...
EDMUND BURKE
Law is twofold -- natural and written. The natural law is in the heart, the written law on tables. A...
SAINT AMBROSE
A law is a law, and it has to be respected.
ELI YISHAI
The law of sowing and reaping is the most trustworthy law of behavior.
HENRY CLOUD
Hard is the law and its bitter, but we have to follow because it is the law.
BIENVENIDO CARIAGA
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
EARL WARREN
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive
EARL WARREN
If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chao...
FELIX FRANKFURTER
The law is the law, and you are here to enforce the law. There are two competing theories of reality...
MIKE RAMSEY
The law is above the law, you know.
DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS
The law is above the law, you know
DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we ...
FELIX FRANKFURTER
When I began we did not really have a lot of First Amendment law. It is really surprising to think o...
FLOYD ABRAMS
That which is not just is not law.
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he wa...
GRAYDON CARTER
The Law School is not only the cradle of China's jurists but has also created a favorable atmosphere...
WANG LIMING
This is a case of law enforcement going bad and, in the final analysis, law enforcement corrected it...
BARRY SCHECK
Moral rights form the essence of copyright law. When they conflict with economic rights, moral right...
KALYAN C. KANKANALA
Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is.
MICHAEL KEATON
Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.
ABBIE HOFFMAN
True law is not imposed; it arises from unintentional developments. (...)Law emerges (...) as someth...
CARL SCHMITT
Progress is The law of life, man is not Man as yet.
ROBERT BROWNING
It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.
THOMAS HOBBES
It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law
THOMAS HOBBES
The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is...
GERRY SPENCE
The words we speak and the thoughts we think control our vibration. Our vibration is a magnet and ev...
JODI LIVON

More Christopher Hitchens

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When Caroline Kennedy managed to say 'you know' more than 200 times in an interview with the...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll b...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particula...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, pu...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-styl...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our und...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for gra...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm crepuscular.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infec...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim under...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When I went back to Iraq again, after the liberation was complete, I was myself engaged on a sort of...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is o...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so e...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hun...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and supers...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On ever...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good fo...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affec...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks c...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He h...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
What do you most value in your friends?
Their continued existence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to w...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
On page 607, alluding to the end of my first marriage (and carefully remembering to state that that'...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was n...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky thi...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite agai...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affec...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-ch...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imper...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in p...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows t...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not pu...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from cele...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to st...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Chemotherapy isn't good for you.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most u...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repud...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous t...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who ris...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possi...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a su...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Say 'Toronto' or 'Ontario,' and the immediate thought associations are with a somewh...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many p...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aun...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The violence in the Bible is appalling.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,&...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most b...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Sus...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[T]he very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made u...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion abou...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or t...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the ha...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert t...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I don't consider myself to be that credulous.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be te...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms,...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialec...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don&#...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The one unforgivable sin is to be boring
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never ag...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and g...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It would be nice to think that the menacing aspects of North Korea were for display also, that the b...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every li...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful becaus...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instea...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatev...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
As I never tire of saying, heat is not the antithesis of light but rather the source of it.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on ut...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate onese...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front f...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in rememb...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn dir...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you di...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indi...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper an...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I vote and I do jury duty.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, i...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is ap...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelie...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had�...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I still think like a Marxist in many ways.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I think the materialist conception of history is valid.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A terrible thing has now happened to religion. Except in the places where it can still enforce itsel...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by bein...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The many instances of forged miracles, and prophecies, and supernatural events, which, in all ages, ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, l...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
only while under the dominion of fear do men fall a prey to superstition; that all the portents ever...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Thus it is brought prominently before us, that superstition’s chief victims are those persons who ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for momen...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A saving grace of the human condition (if I may phrase it like that) is a sense of humor. Many write...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-mad...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, fo...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
It is certain, that, in every religion, however sublime the verbal definition which it gives of its ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Believing then … that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one’s natural pessimis...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to “encourage a hope that the human mind will s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
How sad to be a woman—not to know Aught of the glory of this breast of snow, All unconcerned to co...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of g...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other word...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
To be charitable, one may admit that the religious often seem unaware of how insulting their main pr...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of g...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death i...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the r...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the sp...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or un...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and re...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything i...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John B...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had n...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, bu...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the childre...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The onl...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to th...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really no...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adher...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
[Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Naz...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But th...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to th...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS