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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSThanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
-
-
The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Religion makes kind people say unkind things: “I must prove my faith, so mutilate the genitals of my children.” They wouldn’t do that if God didn’t tell them to do so.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God’s representative on earth.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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 -
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of ‘the flock.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn’t be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS