Christopher Hitchens Quotes

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.

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.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

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

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.

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.

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.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

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.

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

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

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

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

Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

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.

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

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.

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

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.

One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.

Religion makes kind people say unkind things: "I must prove my faith, so mutilate the genitals of my children." They wouldn't do that if God didn't tell them to do so.

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.

I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

Arguments that explain everything... explain nothing

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.

It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.

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

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.