To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSYour favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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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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Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
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The faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.
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It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.
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Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things… one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.
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Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God’s on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.
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I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.
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No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
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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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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.
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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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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 easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God’s representative on earth.
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We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.
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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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS