Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

isn't that theologians deliberately tell untruths. It's as though they just don't care about truth; aren't interested in truth; don't know what truth even means; demote truth to negligible status compared with other considerations, such as symbolic or mythic significance.

La idea de la tortura es tan antigua como la maldad de la humanidad, que es la única especie con la imaginación suficiente para suponer el daño que se puede ocasionar cuando se le inflige a otro. No podemos culpar a la religión de este impulso, pero podemos condenarla por institucionalizar y refinar la práctica.

You don't become an atheist so much as you find out that's what you are.

A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It's not moral to lie to children. It's not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It's immoral.

The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is—because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral.

The values of solidarity, collectivism, and internationalism are not so much desirable as they are actually mandated by nature and reality itself.

The faithful stand acquitted on that charge: we no longer have any need of a god to explain what is no longer mysterious. What believers will do, now that their faith is optional and private and irrelevant, is a matter for them. We should not care, as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion.

Semi-educated people join cults whose whole purpose is to dull the pain of thought, or take medications that claim to abolish anxiety.

To believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

There's a small paradox here; the job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it's more complicated than that.

so much the greater is the triumph of faith in nevertheless believing.

Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Karl Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self-criticism. Membership in the skeptical faction or tendency is not at all a soft option. The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time.

We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness. While

In fact, surveying the natural order, John Stuart Mill was far nearer the mark when he wrote: If a tenth of the pains taken in finding signs of an all-powerful benevolent god had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the creator's character, what scope would not have been found in the animal kingdom? It is divided into devourers and devoured, most creatures being lavishly fitted with instruments to torment their prey.

To accept the spread of cervical cancer in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on a stone alter and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it.

For those who find it remarkable that we live in a universe of Something, just wait. Nothingness is heading on a collision course right toward us.

If belief in a god has to proceed from the assumption that he exists, belief in revelation has first to proceed from the assumption that a god exists and then to go further to the assumption that he communicates his will to certain men. But both are mere assumptions. Neither is, in the present state of knowledge, at all capable of proof.

When the bones of prehistoric animals began to be discovered and scrutinized in the nineteenth century, there were those who said that the fossils had been placed in the rock by god, in order to test our faith. This cannot be disproved. Nor can my own pet theory that, from the patterns of behavior that are observable, we may infer a design that makes planet earth, all unknown to us, a prison colony and a lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations.

Why not, in exchange for the pains and humiliations of being superseded, at least exert the influence that the effete may always bring to bear upon the brash?

racialism is something totally different. It is the invention not of conquered nations but of conquering nations. It is a way of pushing exploitation beyond the point that is normally possible, by pretending that the exploited are not human beings.

Thomas Paine was not wrong in saying that he could not believe in any religion that shocked the mind of a child.)

La loi pakistanaise permet de condamner une femme à subir un viol collectif afin d'expier la honte d'une crime commis par son frère.