Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free.—Kingsley Amis

The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naïveté and simplicity.

In the weirdly beautiful landscapes along the Irish border, most especially in Derry with its haunting evening light along the Waterside and the old walls, and in rainy Belfast with its nineteenth-century slums and yet its permanent view of the lovely surrounding hills, I saw my first "war" without even needing a passport to travel to it.

Even if god is or was an Arab (an unsafe assumption), how could he expect to "reveal" himself by way of an illiterate person who in turn could not possibly hope to pass on the unaltered (let alone unalterable) words?

If the apostles do not know or cannot agree, of what use is my analysis? In any case, if his royal lineage is something to brag and prophesy about, why the insistence elsewhere on apparently lowly birth? Almost all religions from Buddhism to Islam feature either a humble prophet or a prince who comes to identify with the poor, but what is this if not populism? It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated.

Las niñas novias de la India son azotadas y en ocasiones quemadas vivas si se considera que la lastimera dote que aportan al matrimonio es demasiado irrisoria.

Of course, the most flagrant offenders against morality and common sense are still the nihilistic pseudo-leftists, who claim to see no real difference between Western democracy and those who desire to murder its voters at random.

But such was not the case. In considered statements, the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief sephardic rabbi of Israel all took a stand in sympathy with—the ayatollah. So did the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. While they usually managed a few words in which to deplore the resort to violence, all these men stated that the main problem raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy.

The barbaric vernacular word for roasted human in New Guinea and elsewhere was long pig: I have never had the relevant degustatative experience myself, but it seems that we do, if eaten, taste very much like pigs.

To many of us, the claims of Prophet Muhammad to be a Prophet are absurd! Of course we have the right to do that, just as we have the right to represent unchaste nuns, and child-raping priests, and the other people who also claim a special right, because they claim that their own bigotry is divine.

Since it's not really avoidable, I think the question is how to—if you like—turn [hatred] to advantage.... It's a bit like alcohol, if you like. It's a good servant, but it's a bad master.

The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case.

One page, one paragraph, of Hawking is more awe-inspiring, to say nothing of being more instructive, than the whole of Genesis and the whole of Ezekiel.

verdadero valor de un ser humano no viene determinado por su grado de posesión, supuesto o real, de la verdad, sino más bien por la honestidad de su esfuerzo en pos de alcanzarla. No es la posesión de la verdad, sino más bien la búsqueda de la misma, lo que ensancha su capacidad y donde puede hallarse su siempre creciente perfectibilidad. La posesión nos convierte en sujetos pasivos, indolentes y orgullosos.

the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.

Estamos seguros de que se puede vivir una vida ética sin religión. Y de hecho sabemos que el reverso es cierto: que la religión ha ocasionado que innumerables personas no solo no se comporten mejor que otras, sino que se concedan licencias para comportarse de formas que dejarían estupefacto al regente de un burdel o a un genocida.

But Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.

who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. And how grateful we should be to those of our predecessors who repudiated this utter negation of human freedom.

The most educated person in the world now has to admit—I shall not say confess—that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.

People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for.

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. "The sleep of reason," it has been well said, "brings forth monsters.

The empire on which the sun never set was also the empire on which the gore never dried.

Indeed, Ockham stated that it cannot be strictly proved that god, if defined as a being who possesses the qualities of supremacy, perfection, uniqueness, and infinity, exists at all. However, if one intends to identify a first cause of the existence of the world, one may choose to call that "god" even if one does not know the precise nature of the first cause.

My father had died, and very swiftly too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was seventy-nine. I am sixty-one. In whatever kind of 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.