Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard — or try to turn back — the measurable advances that we have made.

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

For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.

It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe; we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

You have to consider yourself created incurably sick, and then ordered on pain of death and eternal torture to be well. This is not morality.

Just a few verses away from the ten commandments is an order to commit genocide, rape, and slavery. I don't object to what people do in the name of religion - I'm objecting to the scripture itself.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence

(…)Mas três coisas ele ilustra, em seu comprometimento com a língua e com a verdade: “opiniões” não contam de fato; o que importa não é o que você pensa, mas como pensa; a política é relativamente desimportante, enquanto princípios, assim como os poucos indivíduos irredutíveis que se mantêm leais a eles, costumam perdurar.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

Everyone has a book in them and that, in most cases, is where it should stay.

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 supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses.

What he is issuing is the distilled violence, cruelty and bigotry - and sexual hypocrisy - that stretches from the Crusades through the Inquisition to the 'concordats' between the church and Hitler and Mussolini.