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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSI 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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSWhat is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSI sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSNo school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSJesus 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 HITCHENSSkepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSReligion 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 HITCHENSThe 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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSShe’s got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSI 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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSTerrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSThere’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 HITCHENSWhat can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSOne 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 HITCHENSSome 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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSHuman beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS