I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSReligion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
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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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Take the risk of thinking for yourself.
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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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Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.
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I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.
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Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.
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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 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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Some 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.
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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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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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I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise.
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I’m a member of no party. I have no ideology. I’m a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that’s all around us.
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No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.
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The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.
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I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.
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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 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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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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The faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.
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I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
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I’m not afraid of being dead, that’s to say there’s nothing to be afraid of. I won’t know I’m dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I’m alive in any way at all, that’ll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.
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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 violence in the Bible is appalling.
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To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS