The noble title of “dissident” must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSI learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
The gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
If you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don’t think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
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.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God’s representative on earth.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -
I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS