Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Real rustics are not conscious of being picturesque, they do not construct bird sanctuaries, they are uninterested in any bird or animal that does not affect them directly ... The fact is that those who really have to deal with nature have no cause to be in love with it.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich st

phenomenon has reappeared in a more troubling form with the holy alliance between the believers and what they can borrow or steal from the world of science. Here is Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, a distinguished professor

Richard Dawkins may have phrased it most pungently when he argued that everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god—from Ra to Shiva—in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.

Find a society that's adopted the teachings of Spinoza, Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits—as a result of doing that—into famine and war and dictatorship and torture and repression. That's the experiment I would like to run. I don't think that's going to end up with a gulag.

For a fuller account of the revelations of the Moscow archives, and their detailed vindication of Orwell, see my Introduction to Orwell in Spain (Penguin, 2001).

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.

We too have unalterable convictions. We too have principles we're willing to fight for, die for, kill for if you like or if you insist. Don't mistake our pluralism, our tolerance and our multiculturalism for weaknesses. We have convictions and principles and we can be offended as well, we can be offended [on free speech and blasphemy intimidation ]

Who but a slave thanks his master for what his master has decided to do without bothering to consult him.

During all this I never quite lost the surreal sense that I had become in some way a pro-government dissident and that of all the paradoxes of my little life this might have to register as the most acute one. ... For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.

Faith of that sort—the sort that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason—is now plainly impossible.

It's the minute fanaticism and superiority of the Almanach that offends: the chilling and narrowing of the kinship tie into something denatured and artificial.

In the infancy of new religions, the wise and learned commonly esteem the matter too inconsiderable to deserve their attention or regard. And when afterwards they would willingly detect the cheat in order to undeceive the deluded multitude, the season is now past, and the records and witnesses, which might clear up the matter, have perished beyond recovery.

religion continues to pose an urgent threat to public health.

Actually, the leap of faith - to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it - is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a leap that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias.

por qué iban «ellos» a molestarse con el tedio de la existencia humana, y menos aún con el del gobierno humano?

It was only when the Britain of great prewar dominions had become a memory that nostalgia for it became possible.

obrar siempre de manera que podamos convertir la máxima de nuestra conducta en ley universal».

That is not blind faith but just the opposite: faith continually tested, corrected and provisionally defended by the testimony of our senses and our common sense.

You must feel not that you want to but that you have to. It's worth emphasizing, too, because there is a relationship, inexact to be sure but a relationship, between this desire or need and the ambition to rely upon internal exile, or dissent; the decision to live at a slight acute angle to society.

Coincidence, said Louis Pasteur, has a tendency to occur only to the mind that is prepared to notice it.

On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that go cares for them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god.

también se adelantó a Freud al ridiculizar la idea de disponer de antemano ritos funerarios y monumentos conmemorativos, todos los cuales manifestaban el vano e inútil deseo de estar presente de algún modo en el propio funeral.