Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Some of those who rest in unvisited tombs may have contributed to the good of the world, but those who preached hatred and fear and guilt and who ruined innumerable childhoods should have been thankful that the hell they preached was only one among their wicked falsifications, and that they were not sent to rot there.

The will to command and to dominate is one thing, but the will to obey and be prostrate is a deadly foe as well.

With an unctuous smile they offer a redemption that is not theirs to bestow and, when questioned, put on the menacing scowl that says, "Oh, so you reject our offer of paradise? Well, in that case we have quite another fate in store for you." Such love! Such care!

trade. They wrote down their history and had discovered a 365-day calendar that was more accurate than its European counterparts. One particular society—the Mayan—had also managed to come up with that beautiful concept of zero to which I alluded earlier, and without which mathematical computation is very difficult. It may

All societies that have tried to keep themselves 'pure,' from the Confucian Chinese through to the Castilian Spanish to the post-Wilhelmine Germans, have collapsed into barbarism, insularity and superstition. And swiftly enough for us to be certain that the fall was no more connected to the genes than was the rise. There is no gene for I.Q., and there is no genetic or evolutionary timing that is short enough to explain histories or societies.

She merely desires to be taken at her own valuation and to be addressed universally as "Mother Teresa." Her success is not, therefore, a triumph of humility and simplicity. It is another chapter in a millennial story which stretches back to the superstitious childhood of our species, and which depends on the exploitation of the simple and the humble by the cunning and the single-minded.

Billy Wilder, Lenny Bruce, Saul

I know what's coming you see. I know no one beats these odds and I know it's a matter of getting used to that and realizing that you are expelled from your mother's uterus as if shot from a cannon towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks. It's a matter of how you use up the intervening time in an intelligent and ironic way; and try not to do anything ghastly to your fellow creatures.

It should bear its own health warning: so sugary that you may need an insulin shot to withstand it.

It may be that... you recognize something of yourself in these instances... a disposition to resistance... against arbitrary authority or witless mass opinion

justified in the name of "security" like almost every cowardly idiocy before and since

Anyone who uses 'childhood' and 'dream' in the same sentence usually gets my attention.

Watching and listening up close, I saw nothing to suggest that if his brains were made of TNT they would generate enough explosive power to disarrange his hair.

However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of "progress," in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection.

If it should seem odd that an action should be deliberately performed in order that a foretelling be vindicated, that is because it is odd.

Sei que não sou o único que não se importa nem um pouco se ilusões religiosas forem ridicularizadas, mas se fosse o único, ainda assim não daria a mínima.

In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them.

The most arresting thing about Palin, indeed, is the absolutely unbreachable serenity of her ignorance. She already has all the information she requires.

The great reward, if that's the right word, lies in the people you will meet when engaged in the same work, the lessons you will learn, and the confidence you will acquire from having some experiences and convictions of your own - to set against the received thirdhand opinions of so many others.

Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically:

Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it has become a threat to human survival.

Durante la mayor parte de la historia de la humanidad la idea de un Estado total o absoluto estuvo íntimamente ligada a la religión.

The Diebold company, which also manufactures ATMs, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable.

Dios no creó al ser humano a su imagen y semejanza. Evidentemente, fue al revés, lo cual constituye la sencilla explicación para toda esta profusión de dioses y religiones y para la lucha fratricida, tanto entre cultos distintos como en el seno de cada uno de ellos, que se desarrolla continuamente a nuestro alrededor y que tanto ha retrasado el progreso de la civilización.