One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSI’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.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
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Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.
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The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.
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Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.
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Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
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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.
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To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’
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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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The finest fury is the most controlled.
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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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Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.
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To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off.
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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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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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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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Take the risk of thinking for yourself.
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We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.
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What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.
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It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.
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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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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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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 Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
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Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
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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.
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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