Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Cuanto peor es el infractor, más devoto resulta ser.

When priests go bad, they go very bad indeed, and commit crimes that would make the average sinner pale.

theory of natural selection itself seems calculated to foster selfishness at the expense of public good, violence, callous indifference to suffering, short term greed at the expense of long term foresight. If scientific theories could vote, evolution would surely vote Republican.

The point is that Socrates was mocking his accusers in their own terms, saying in effect: I do not know for certain about death and the gods—but I am as certain as I can be that you do not know, either.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so.

Very often in my experience, the extraneous or irrelevant complexities are inserted when a matter of elementary justice or principle is at issue.

As I look back on my long and arduous struggle to make myself over, and on my dismaying recent glimpses of lost babyhood, I am more than ever sure that it's enough to be born once, and to take one's chances, and to grow old disgracefully.

The highest art in low politics is to be able to induce the masses to invest their own sense of dignity in yours. Then, if you are exposed as a fraud, they will be exposed as credulous: a conclusion they approach with a natural human reluctance.

The life of an oppositionist is supposed to be difficult.) I

By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage.

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on.

No creo en la inmortalidad del individuo, y considero que la ética es una preocupación exclusivamente humana que no está respaldada por ninguna autoridad sobrehumana.

And do you think that unto such as you A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew God gave a secret, and denied it me? Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too! —THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM (RICHARD LE GALLIENNE TRANSLATION)

The rules of all intellectual activity Ã¢â'¬â€œ whether scientific or non-scientific Ã¢â'¬â€œ spin down to one golden precept: the testing of assertions on the anvils of logic and verifiable fact. For an argument to obtain, it must make sense rationally and empirically.

What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

The stamp of the lowly origin is to be found in our appendix, in the now needless coat of hair that we still grow (and then shed) after five months in the womb, in our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many caprices of our urinogenital arrangements. Why do people keep saying, "God is in the details"? He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.

Orwell's 'views' have been largely vindicated by Time, so he need not seek any pardon on that score. But what he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views' do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

A further difficulty is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies.

temos arte e achamos que os sérios dilemas éticos são mais bem abordados por Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Schiller, Dostoievski e George Eliot do que pelas histórias morais míticas dos livros sagrados.

The banality of cancer seems to irk him almost as much as its lethality. Lacking any dialectical substance, it affords few opportunities to escape platitude or avoid cliché. It's a big subject, but it's essentially small talk

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christian torture and burning of women who did not conform.

The challenge with love is not allowing your strengths to negate themselves.

Las atrocidades religiosas del pasado y el presente no se han producido porque nosotros seamos malos, sino porque en la naturaleza es un hecho que desde el punto de vista biológico la especie humana es racional solo en parte.

Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.