FastSaying

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.


Christopher Hitchens

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix.
DEYTH BANGER Life is weird and wonderful like that, is it not.
SONYA.E.WILLIAMS What matters is the one thing I do know for certain: God is with me.
CRAIG GROESCHEL The whole fame question is one that is constantly intriguing to me. I think that fame is something t...
CAMPBELL SCOTT When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. ...
ERIK PEVERNAGIE What Fucks me... is that we both are the same... we all walk on the same path... but everything is a...
DEYTH BANGER I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believe...
DALAI LAMA I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believe...
DALAI LAMA Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM I’ve learned that you can’t predict [love] or plan for it. For someone like me who is obsessed w...
TAYLOR SWIFT When I die it will be game over,... but I know one life is short, to be selfish is not the best deci...
DEYTH BANGER One lesson is that if you want to predict voter turnout, you should ask whether at least one candida...
CASS SUNSTEIN Perhaps one reason for the falling-off of belief in a continuance of conscious existence is to be fo...
ALBERT J. NOCK I am obsessive always, even as a child. On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other i...
MARINA ABRAMOVIC There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perf...
MICHAEL CHABON If you pour everything you have into this life, this world, which is temporary and fading, you're je...
CRAIG GROESCHEL It is what it is, it is what you make it.
JAMES DURBIN Somehow in the 20th Century an idea has developed that music is an activity or skill which is not co...
GAVIN BRYARS There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious busine...
MAY SARTON When carrying the burden of problems and stress that life seems to endlessly hurtle towards us. We g...
GARY F EVANS... To have hope in an age where hope is very scarce and hurt, jealousy and pain are more prominent is a...
GARY F EVANS... Be a good guide, tell me what you see, are sure is that?
Please try to describe the picture as ...
DEYTH BANGER I am Happy and satisfied with what I am. 10000 will take me wrong, 1000 will go against me, 100 will...
NEHA KOTHARI Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY the story is not a pretty one. there is violence in it. And cruelty. But stories that are not pretty...
KATE DICAMILLO Being present is being connected to All Things.
S. KELLEY HARRELL, M. DIV. It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER It's one of those golf courses that fits your eye. Not too many golf courses you play all year that ...
TIGER WOODS I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one spe...
MICHAEL SHERMER I believe that life is a journey towards God, and that no one has the right to insist that you go a ...
PAT BUCKLEY Everyone got a follower, how good or bad is all this shit, it's another topic… JUst leave it for l...
DEYTH BANGER There is only one greater folly than that of the fool who says in his heart there is no God, and tha...
OTTO VON BISMARCK There is only one greater folly than that of the fool who says in his heart there is no God, and tha...
OTTO VON BISMARCK One of the problems I have with a lot of movies these days is that everything is too well lit. In th...
BILL SIENKIEWICZ I realized the universe had consumed my whole entity with its divine sensation of eternal bliss. All...
ABHIJIT NASKAR To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone min...
GEORGE ORWELL Cassia.
I know which life is my real one now, no matter what happens. It’s the one with you. ...
ALLY CONDIE I have always liked the idea of Superman because I have always liked the idea that there is one pers...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND Each of us knows it all, and knows he knows it all—the rest, to a man, are fools and eluded. One m...
MARK TWAIN What is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act?
CRAIG GROESCHEL Is the conclusion that the universe was designed - and that the design extends deeply into life - sc...
MICHAEL J. BEHE Religion is like a pair of shoes.....Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes.
GEORGE CARLIN I have often talked with angels on this subject, and they have invariably declared that in heaven th...
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG David cuts through all the many needs, wants, and desires that may have been bouncing around inside ...
CRAIG GROESCHEL Laughter is illusion… But THE BIGGEST ONE, which you can ever encounter in your life.
DEYTH BANGER Better for the judge to see my innocence than for me to think I see it. It is very comfortable for m...
CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, moth...
LEONARDO DA VINCI My aim is to argue that the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is...
PETER ATKINS I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact...
ISAAC ASIMOV One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. Th...
ALBERT EINSTEIN Our young should be at ease with the fact that every mind works differently, and that there is never...
HAROUTIOUN BOCHNAKIAN There is a story, there is a scene which you always miss and you never pay attention at it... (The R...
DEYTH BANGER I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one direc...
STEPHEN HAWKING The mechanic, when a wheel refuses to turn, never thinks of dropping on his knees and asking the ass...
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL The only kind of universe that I can even begin to conceive is an inconceivable one.
ILYAS KASSAM I find that working with friends is always the goal, even if it's just one person. Because the c...
LIZZY CAPLAN The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in whi...
BENJAMIN H. BRATTON Why should a religion claim that it is not bound to abide by the standpoint of reason! If one does n...
ABHIJIT NASKAR Our life is a series of moments. Let them all go. Moments. All gathering towards this one.
NOW IS GOOD There are those who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful on...
NEIL GAIMAN Your heart just breaks, that's all. But you can't judge or point fingers. You just have to be lucky ...
AUDREY HEPBURN One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. Th...
ALBERT EINSTEIN In the beginning there was nothing, and then god created "me".
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA Now isn´t the time to change yourself to fit into the world... you should be changing the world to ...
ALEXANDRA BRACKEN Jane Heard.
ONE The battle is not physical, it is spiritual and your mind is the battleground. Keep your mind pure a...
JEANETTE CORON For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this jus...
MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and t...
WILLIAM GOLDING That's it really; it's all love, whichever way you look at it, it's all love. How much you can Get f...
GEORGE HARRISON The idea that the doubt is left in a player's mind as to whether there was a right call or not is tr...
ARLEN KANTARIAN Daily I live with [one] fear--a healthy fear if there is such a thing. [It is] that I will miss some...
CAROLE MAYHALL One idea that I toyed around with is that dark energy is a complicated network of rubber sheets. If ...
HITOSHI MURAYAMA The one thing I am now sure of is that if there is such a thing as destiny, it is a result of our pa...
M. J. ROSE His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING For some extraordinary reason, the Church moves in an atmosphere of antiquity. I have no doubt that ...
WILLIAM BARCLAY There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one ...
DONALD DAVIDSON I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself....
WALKER PERCY One of the biggest challenges of writing for middle-grade or even young-adult readers is that I don&...
ALANE FERGUSON I can't even
SARAH VAN WATERSCHOOT A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is...
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings
LOUIS-HECTOR BERLIOZ At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.
HECTOR BERLIOZ Tim was never only into one thing or setting out to do one specific genre. There is not really a spe...
JULIE DOYLE I'm not an Emontional, but how???
I live with the thought that "Nothing can be returned, it has...
DEYTH BANGER One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and...
ROBIN INCE I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It...
ELIZABETH WINDER One thing about Patrick is he's a real good student. I think he's smart, and kind of knows when you ...
JOE GIBBS The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for tha...
DAVID STEINBERG To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epipha...
DAN SIMMONS There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or...
ALBERT CAMUS ...the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fu...
JACQUES MONOD Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. T...
HENRY MILLER A secret is a strange thing.

There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone k...
MAGGIE STIEFVATER Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we ...
J.B.S. HALDANE The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communic...
DAVID CRONENBERG The tendency to turn human judgments into divine commands makes religion one of the most dangerous f...
GEORGIA HARKNESS If I'm not thinking about one shit storm, I have to think about another.
KAREN M. MCMANUS Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe...
JAMES MARTINEAU There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes ...
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

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