The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSI’m an atheist. I’m not neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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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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My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it against any consensus, any majority anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.
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I became a journalist because I didn’t want to have to rely on the press for information… I only read it to make sure of whatever everyone else thinks is going on, because it’s useful to know what people think is the news.
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Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.
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To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
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What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.
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Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.
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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.
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The gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
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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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Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
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Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.
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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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The violence in the Bible is appalling.
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The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS