Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.

The thing about religion is that it's the first and the worst. The worst because it's the first.

Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil

Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

Religion poisons everything

I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it.

Say 'Toronto' or 'Ontario,' and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, 'He is not a lush.' That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, 'Look!'

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early.

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

Human society is inconceivable unless words are to some extent bonds.

All of life is a wager