The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSThe noble title of “dissident” must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.
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I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.
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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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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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We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.
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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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Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
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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 violence in the Bible is appalling.
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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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To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off.
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To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’
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Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.
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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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What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
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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.
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Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.
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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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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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I 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.
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Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.
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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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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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My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.
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The noble title of “dissident” must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS