Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSThe essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.
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No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.
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The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
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If the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.
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The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.
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Even if I accepted that Jesus – like almost every other prophet on record – was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.
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If you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don’t think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.
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The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.
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There’s been some research in cognitive science, I’m told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it’s white noise.
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Today I want to puke when I hear the word ‘radical’ applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.
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I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.
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I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it’s a form of love, and it deserves our respect for that reason.
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Arguments that explain everything explain nothing.
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One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.
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The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
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So there’s nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn’t really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it’s the most nauseating spectacle.
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I’m a member of no party. I have no ideology. I’m a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that’s all around us.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
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In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
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The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
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I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
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I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language – always the language – was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.
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What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
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The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God’s representative on earth.
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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.
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One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS