This groundbreaking collection of unpublished speeches by the late Christopher Hitchens—author of the #1 New York Times bestseller god is not Great—offers sharp rebukes to tyrants and the ill-informed everywhere.

Christopher Hitchens was arguably the most erudite, provocative, and polarizing writers of the last twenty-five years. When he passed away in 2011 from esophageal cancer, writers, readers, pundits and critics the world over mourned his loss.

Hitchens had a gift for lifting his audiences, both on the page and in lecture halls, by the passion of his voice, the moral urgency of his attacks, the bite and complexity of his wit, and the swagger and seeming spontaneity of his lyrical soliloquies. His now-legendary public lectures and debates cemented his status as the kind of literary phenomenon who comes along but once in a generation.

No matter the subject, Hitchens’s arguments each ultimately pointed to the same end: freedom from tyranny in any and all forms. Why Religion Is Immoral brings together the most memorable of the arguments he made over the last two decades, including: the case against God, faith and religious observance; the case for intervention in Iraq; jabs at towering political figures like Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger; as well as celebrations of the pleasures of drinking, and of the writers whose lives and work most influenced his own, such as George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, among others.