Christopher Hitchens Quotes: 36

• Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.

  The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

• I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

• That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

• To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?

• Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

• Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

• We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

• What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

• What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

• Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

• [E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

• I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

• For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16

• Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

• 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.

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

• My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended 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.

• How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

• To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

• Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

• Who are your favorite 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.

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

• I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

• I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

  The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

• We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

• God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

• If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.

• Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

• Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.

• Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

• I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit.

• Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.

• If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

  Mortality

• What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

• Cheap booze is a false economy.

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

• it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

• Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

  Hitch-22: A Memoir

• A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.