Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

At certain times of the day, and at particular bends in the road or curves of the shore, Cyprus is still so lovely that it takes you by the throat.

Es que quiere evitar el mal y es incapaz de hacerlo? Entonces, es que es impotente. ¿Es que puede, pero no quiere? Entonces es malévolo. ¿Es que quiere y puede? Entonces, ¿de dónde proviene el mal?6

Incidentally, by what awful ironic betrayal of our language do we find ourselves accusing bigots and tribalists of the sin of 'discrimination'? They are the ones who judge severely by category, and yet can't tell anyone apart. 'Discrimination' is only one of the moral and intellectual exercises that they are quite unable to perform.

It's often been observed that the major religions can give no convincing account of Paradise. They do much better in representing Hell; indeed one of the early Christian dogmatists, Tertullian, borrowed the vividness of the latter to lend point to the former. Among the delights of Heaven, he decided, would be the contemplation of the tortures of the damned.

At least he had some of the right enemies, even if he didn't do enough to earn them.

In other words, a handful of religious bullies and bigmouths could, so to speak, outvote the tradition of free expression in its Western heartland.

As soon as I entered the room, he cried out, without any other greeting: You've gotten very fat! It was his way of disarming, I thought, any horror I might have felt at his own pudding-like rotundity, which had trebled since I had seen him last.

One of Professor Bart Ehrman's more astonishing findings is that the account of Jesus's resurrection in the Gospel of Mark was only added many years later.)

Abd al-Aziz bin Baz, the late grand mufti of Saudi Arabia

I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings, I say, 'I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.

I have met many brave men and women, morally superior to myself, whose courage in adversity derives from their faith. But whenever they have chosen to speak or write about it, I have found myself appalled by the instant decline of their intellectual and moral standards. They want god on their side and believe they are doing his work--what is this, even at its very best, but an extreme from of solipsism?

já não temos nenhuma necessidade de um deus para explicar o que não é mais misterioso. O que os crentes farão agora que sua fé é opcional, particular e irrelevante é problema deles. Não devemos nos importar, desde que eles não façam novas tentativas de inculcar a religião por qualquer forma de coerção.

Perfectionists and zealots can break but not bend; in my experience they are subject to burnout from diminishing returns or else, to borrow Santayana's definition of the fanatic, they redouble their efforts just when they have lost sight of their ends.

one of the great failures of human civilization has been its refusal to pay proper attention, or a proper wage, to those who perform the hard but essential primary task of growing our food.

O ceticismo e as descobertas os libertaram do fardo de ter de defender seu deus como um cientista louco tolo, desajeitado e primário, e também de ter de responder a perguntas perturbadoras

Then again, on another day, one might open the newspaper to read that the largest study of prayer ever undertaken had discovered yet again that there was no correlation of any kind between "intercessory" prayer and the recovery of patients. (Well, perhaps some correlation: patients who knew that prayers were being said for them had more postoperative complications than those who did not, though I would not argue that this proved anything.)

Corruptio optimi pessima: no greater cruelty will be devised than by those who are sure, or are assured, that they are doing good.

Meanwhile, the hoarse proponents of "intelligent design" would be laying siege to yet another school board, demanding that tripe be taught to children.

One of the very many connections between religious belief an the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species is the repressed desire to see everything smashed up and ruined and brought to naught.

Tertuliano de que cuanto mayor es la estupidez, más fuerte es la creencia en ella, que la fe alcanza su cota máxima cuando sus enseñanzas son menos asimilables por la razón.

the testing of assertions on the anvils of logic and verifiable fact.

The church has made efforts to apologize for all this, but its complicity with fascism is an ineffaceable mark on its history, and was not a short-term or a hasty commitment so much as a working alliance which did not break down until after the fascist period had itself passed into history.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, the most brilliant line of which says that it is capitalism that lays upon men "the sordid necessity of living for others." Robert Tressell's novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) is the only rival to The Jungle