Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.

if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Márquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.

Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor expressed by writer Christopher Hitchens. It says that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens has phrased the razor in writing as What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

George Bush is a WASP. George Wallace may have been a white Protestant of Anglo-Saxon descent, and even rather vocal on all three points, but a WASP he was not.

wrong. Religious opinion is wrong by definition. We can't avoid

But the Seventies were only the Seventies because they had to have a name. Nullity and anticlimax appeared to close in on all sides.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that the great success of Stalinism among the intellectuals could be attributed to one annihilating tactic. Stalinism replaced all debate about the merit of an argument, or a position, or even a person, with an inquiry about motive.

The various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. —EDWARD GIBBON, DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Orwell's] very ordinariness is the sterling guarantee that we need no saintly representative consciences. We would do better to make sterner use of our own.

The Dalai Lama, for example, is entirely and easily recognizable to a secularist. In exactly the same way as a medieval princeling, he makes the claim not just that Tibet should be independent of Chinese hegemony—a "perfectly good" demand, if I may render it into everyday English—but that he himself is a hereditary king appointed by heaven itself. How convenient! Dissenting sects within his faith are persecuted; his one-man rule in an Indian enclave is absolute;

I can think of a handful of priests and bishops and rabbis and imams who have put humanity ahead of their own sect or creed.

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death.

Orwell was interested above all not in the rationalizations of the dominant, but in the excuses and whimperings of the submissive.

AND you lose weight but cancer isn't interested in eating your flab. It wants your muscle.

This is made additionally problematic by the tendency of modern medicine to fall back on the use of euphemistic

People assert themselves out of an unquenchable sense of dignity.

In this respect, religion is not unlike racism. One version of it inspires and provokes the other.

The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been Christians, since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master's announcements. (There is scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the founder of a church, either.)

In order for life to take hold at all on a cooling planet, it had first to occur with fantastic profusion. We have a micro-glimpse of this in our little human lives: men produce infinitely more seminal fluid than is required to build a human family, and are tortured—not completely unpleasantly—by the urgent need to spread it all over the place or otherwise get rid of it.

The people who must never have power are the humorless.

Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity.

Real horror of the porcine is manifest all over the Islamic world. One good instance would be the continued prohibition of George Orwell's Animal Farm, one of the most charming and useful fables of modern times, of the reading of which Muslim schoolchildren are deprived. I have perused some of the solemn prohibition orders written by Arab education ministries, which are so stupid that they fail to notice the evil and dictatorial role played by the pigs in the story itself.

It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one's ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful.