Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will provide plenty of time for silence.
Christopher Hitchens
Related Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordin... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS To be, or not to be, that is the question. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE To be or not to be. That's not really a question. JEAN-LUC GODARD To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be. GOLDA MEIR Do I have the courage of being a ruthless man to myself with the complete knowledge on my manner or ... FEREIDOON YAZDI Be kind. We never know what people are going through. Give grace and mercy because one day your circ... GERMANY KENT Kindness is universal. Sometimes being kind allows others to see the goodness in humanity through yo... GERMANY KENT Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls i... JOSEPH CONRAD To be mad is worse than not to be if this is what it is. JOHNNY RICH Hamlet's Cat's Soliloquy "To go outside, and there perchance to stay Or to re... HENRY N. BEARD To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being. TOM ROBBINS I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who ... NEIL GAIMAN The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surpr... C.S. LEWIS I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES I’ve tried so hard to stay away from you,” he whispered one night, cuddling her while the moonli... LISA KLEYPAS If you were to ask everyone what 'Hamlet' was about, they might say, "It's about a ... ORLANDO BLOOM To date or not to date that is the question. It's almost as important as Shakespeare's to be... AL GOLDSTEIN Reach out and help others. If you have the power to make someone happy, do it. Be a vessel, be the c... GERMANY KENT He's for you and wants to help you be the person He created you to be. CRAIG GROESCHEL Five billion people have played Hamlet. 'To be or not to be.' And how do you do that and fin... ANNETTE BENING Be nice to people... maybe it'll be unappreciated, unreciprocated, or ignored, but spread the love a... GERMANY KENT Anyways, that very same night there was a fight in the casino on B Deck. Some of the passengers got ... CHRISTINA ENGELA Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were se... SALMAN RUSHDIE They subordinate the whole to the part. It is no longer life they are celebrating, nor nature, but s... DOROTHY MACARDLE Be your own person, don't follow the crowd, and above all, stand out. BEN OAK If God give you strength and courage, don't use it to intimidate people or overpower them, rather us... ANTHONY LICCIONE Sheep don’t need the shepherd to be what they are. The shepherd needs sheep to be what he is. LJUPKA CVETANOVA To be, or not to be: what a question! E.A. BUCCHIANERI What will make you a star is in you SOTONYE ANGA Just remember to always be yourself and don’t be afraid to speak your mind or to dream out loud J.A. REDMERSKI I still believe that any country understands that if they use nuclear weapons, they will be wiped ou... MOHAMED ELBARADEI I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a care... PHIL KNIGHT Who will you be, my Little Ones? Will you dance for the fires of your youth and run at midnight to w... CAREW PAPRITZ Shaq pe hai yaqeen unko, Yaqeen pe hai shaq Mujhy..... .....Kis ka jhoot jhoot hai, K... VISHAL BHARADWAJ - HAIDER FILM Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day. CRAIG GROESCHEL Be the girl you want your daughter to be. Be the girl you want your son to date. Be classy, be smart... GERMANY KENT It's a a damn good day to be alive. MICHAEL CLIFFORD If you are feeling constrained by a group that you belong to, ask yourself, “How can I partic... GINA GREENLEE You never knew the last time you were seeing someone. You didn't know when the last argument happene... J.R. WARD The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them ... NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes... JEAN SASSON but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short. JANE AUSTEN If you are facing a new challenge or being asked to do something that you have never done before don... JOYCE MEYER Treat everyone you meet as if he or she were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the ca... OG MANDINO Do what feel is right, and back yourself up. Live the life you want to live, JACK BARAKAT The more God is glorified the more man is energic and the more satan is weak. INDONESIA123 You don't need to paint a perfect picture of yourself or your life for anybody. Just be real. If peo... AKIROQ BROST Who you are is not determined by what you wear, the money in your wallet, nor how you look. Who you ... MARY KATE You are whoever and however you decide to be. You choose in every moment how to react, how to act to... AKIROQ BROST Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and... MITCH ALBOM However, if you do not believe your clients, they may sense your doubt and never fully trust you. As... APHRODITE MATSAKIS Don’t judge or compare yourself with others. You are not same as others. You are who you are and y... ABDUS SALAM It will be very hard. You’ll make a million mistakes, and you’ll pay for them all, one way or an... DERRICK JENSEN Either offend or represent, don’t be a spectator. PRADEEPA PANDIYAN You do it for yourself. You don’t expect to change the world. You don’t even expect to influence... MARTIN SHEEN Stay true to yourself.Take everyday challenge in your stride & strive to make journey of life exactl... DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA Be true to yourself.Give wings of confidence & courage to your endeavour. Your strength is reflected... DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA In my experience, there never seems to be a man or woman who will walk in and literally sweep you of... JENNIFER SALAIZ How to change the world: • spread positivity • bring people up instead of dragging the... GERMANY KENT I was emotional. I wanted to be taken seriously. I was pretty emo. I was reciting Shakespeare monolo... CONSTANCE WU Money doesn't change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greed... HENRY FORD Those who advocate secularism and honestly want separation of church and state can't fully appreciat... BOBBY W. MILLER To know if someone can speak offensively or politely, don’t give him poem to recite; don’t give ... ISRAELMORE AYIVOR Let today mark a new beginning for you. Give yourself permission to say NO without feeling guilty, m... STEPHANIE LAHART Don't settle for a normal life. Not when you can enjoy the wonderful weirdness of being who God crea... CRAIG GROESCHEL She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies ... J.D. SALINGER Not everyone has the time to be normal. LJUPKA CVETANOVA Here's some simple advice: Always be yourself. Never take yourself to seriously. And beware of advic... JIM HENSON Go the extra mile to do the undone, but work within your limits, and in doing so also, don’t be a ... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH I believe God himself will someday debate with and answer every objection arrogant men can come up w... CRISS JAMI I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else your co-star, per... LEMONY SNICKET Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century... DAME EDNA EVERAGE Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to... FERNANDO PESSOA I’m not the biggest fan of family photographs. Think about it for a second…not only do they remi... SUMMER JEIRLES the seriousness of emotional deprivation: It is not difficult to understand how children ... MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI 7 Rules to a Happy Life: 1. Be humble 2. Don’t worry 3. Don't settle for les... GERMANY KENT Be encouraged. Hold your head up high and know God is in control and has a plan for you. Instead of ... GERMANY KENT If you make time for the nonsense, good or bad, it will continue to seek you out. GARY HOPKINS Who are you? A noise or a melody? Or may be you are a silence! If you are a silence, then you will b... MEHMET MURAT ILDAN May I never neither turn left nor turn right in my journey of life, but may I go straight to Christ ... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH Don't waste your time trying to provide people with proof of deceit, in order to keep their love, wi... SHANNON L. ALDER I had a chat with May and I had a sweet talk with April but the lovely conversation that left me to ... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of live... MARY OLIVER Be who you want to be not what others think you should be. BILAL SAIF Not," Swift said firmly, "for all the tea in China." "That expression has never made sense to m... LISA KLEYPAS They say you never know what you would do in a hypothetical situation. We’d all like to think we�... HUNTLEY FITZPATRICK When you start to appreciate and be aware of what is intrinsically good, you start to be happy with ... MAICHEE SUMMER A person who is humble would never be abusive or selfish; so don't abuse yourself or withhold self-l... BRYANT MCGILL The words I'm singing now
Mean nothing more than meow to an animal THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to... SUZANNE FARRELL Don't be afraid to make things up. Never fear being exposed as a fraud. Experts make things up a... STEPHEN COLBERT There are people everywhere who form a Forth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ... JAN MORRIS Feast of Patrick, Bishop of Armagh, Missionary, Patron of Ireland, c.460 Some people want to see ... MEISTER ECKHART all human work (especially excellent work), done by all people, as a channel of God’s love for his... TIMOTHY J. KELLER It would be useful for people to get out of the all-or-nothing mind-set that unless they exercise fo... GLENN GAESSER I hate that just because you happen to be good at something,people automatically think that's what m... AMBER SMITH If you want something fine for life, you owe it to yourself to have it or reject it outright. Don’... LILY CHATTERJEE Thus, a people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, ... JOHN STUART MILL If you're in drama and absolutely told your story in all truth. You can consider yourself out of the... CEDRICK HOBBS Those who joined us for selfish personal reasons, for a career or other motives will be the ones to ... JANOS KADAR
More Christopher Hitchens
To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage a... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle a... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS When Caroline Kennedy managed to say 'you know' more than 200 times in an interview with the... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll b... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particula... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, pu... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-styl... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our und... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for gra... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I'm crepuscular. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infec... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg s... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim under... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS When I went back to Iraq again, after the liberation was complete, I was myself engaged on a sort of... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is o... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so e... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hun... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and supers... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On ever... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good fo... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affec... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks c... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He h... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to w... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS On page 607, alluding to the end of my first marriage (and carefully remembering to state that that'... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was n... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky thi... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite agai... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affec... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-ch... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imper... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in p... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself s... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows t... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not pu... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from cele... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to st... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Chemotherapy isn't good for you. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most u... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repud... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous t... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who ris... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possi... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a su... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Say 'Toronto' or 'Ontario,' and the immediate thought associations are with a somewh... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many p... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aun... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The violence in the Bible is appalling. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,&... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most b... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Sus... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [T]he very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made u... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction a... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion abou... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or t... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the ha... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert t... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I don't consider myself to be that credulous. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, a... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be te... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms,... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialec... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The one unforgivable sin is to be boring CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never ag... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and g... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS It would be nice to think that the menacing aspects of North Korea were for display also, that the b... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every li... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful becaus... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instea... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatev... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS As I never tire of saying, heat is not the antithesis of light but rather the source of it. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on ut... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate onese... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front f... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in rememb... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn dir... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you di... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indi... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper an... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS There can be no progress without head-on confrontation. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I vote and I do jury duty. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, i... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is ap... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelie... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had�... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I still think like a Marxist in many ways. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I think the materialist conception of history is valid. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS A terrible thing has now happened to religion. Except in the places where it can still enforce itsel... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by bein... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The many instances of forged miracles, and prophecies, and supernatural events, which, in all ages, ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, l... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS only while under the dominion of fear do men fall a prey to superstition; that all the portents ever... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Thus it is brought prominently before us, that superstition’s chief victims are those persons who ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for momen... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS A saving grace of the human condition (if I may phrase it like that) is a sense of humor. Many write... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-mad... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, fo... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS It is certain, that, in every religion, however sublime the verbal definition which it gives of its ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Believing then … that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one’s natural pessimis... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to “encourage a hope that the human mind will s... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS How sad to be a woman—not to know Aught of the glory of this breast of snow, All unconcerned to co... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of g... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other word... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS To be charitable, one may admit that the religious often seem unaware of how insulting their main pr... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of g... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death i... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the r... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the sp... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or un... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for s... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and re... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything i... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John B... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had n... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, bu... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the childre... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless s... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The onl... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to th... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really no... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adher... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Naz... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of ... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But th... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to th... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS