Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Those who naively credit Gandhi with a conscientious or consistent pacifism might wish to ask if this did not amount to letting the Japanese imperialists do his fighting for him.

and showed him to be a villa-dwelling dependent and not an ascetic cave-dwelling guerrilla.

the first rule—he calls it the rule of rules—is the art of challenging what is appealing.

not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died

arriésgate a pensar por ti mismo encontraras mas felicidad, verdad, belleza y sabiduría

The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother

Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets ... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified 'white' candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?

There is, and there always has been, an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person's propensity to be impressed by the measurement of I.Q.

he despised the alternative flow of information and insight, which was gossip and rumor. Like Winston Smith, he was first and foremost activated by a raging thirst to know: a thirst that could only be slaked by a personal quest for the least varnished version of the truth.

Another way in which religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith and instead offer "evidence" in the sense normally understood, is by the argument from revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed unalterable laws that could then be passed on to those less favored.

Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearful, partially formed animals with a terror of death and the dark

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do. When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes. When I go to the synagogue, I cover my head. I once even observed the etiquette of an ashram in India, though this was a trial to me.

All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind.

The 'environment' is not the gift of entrepreneurs, risk takers, or investors. It is the common, inherited property of humanity.

No one can deny, in face of the evidence, that it is easy, given military power, to produce a population of fanatical lunatics. It would be equally easy to produce a population of sane and reasonable people, but many governments do not wish to do so, since such people would fail to admire the politicians who are at the head of these governments.

It's important to be able to recognise and seize crux moments when they do appear, but much of the time one is faced with quotidian tasks and routines. There's an art and a science to these things; the art consists in trying to improvise more inventive means of breaking a silence and the science consists in trying to make the periods of silence bearable.

There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.

As Edward Gibbon observed about the modes of worship prevalent in the Roman world, they were "considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful.

An antique saying has it that a man's life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty, and war.

You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer's reply: "Then please tell him to stop kissing me.

Nothing proves the man-made nature of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven - except as a place of either worldly comfort, eternal tedium, or (as Tertullian thought) continual relish in the torture of others.

Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of the praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be of the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!)

because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing—

The usual duty of the intellectual is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae