Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSShe’s got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.
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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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.
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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.
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I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.
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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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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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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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I’m not afraid of being dead, that’s to say there’s nothing to be afraid of. I won’t know I’m dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I’m alive in any way at all, that’ll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.
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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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The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
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The noble title of “dissident” must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
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Take the risk of thinking for yourself.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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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I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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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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 -
It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
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.
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Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.
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The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS