If the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSIf the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
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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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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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What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.
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What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
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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.
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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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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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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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To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?
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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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Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things… one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.
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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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If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
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It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.
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How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
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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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What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
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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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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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The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
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Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
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Jesus 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.
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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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The finest fury is the most controlled.
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We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS