Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

the God of birds and trees would have to be also the God of birth defects and cancer.

The latter, which honors Abraham's willingness to make a human sacrifice of his son, is common to all three monotheisms, and descends from their primitive ancestors.

There is an intriguing paradox here: evolution does not have eyes but it can create them.

The prelude involves a series of vilenesses and delusions, from the seduction of Lot by both his daughters to the marriage of Abraham to his stepsister, the birth of Isaac to Sarah when Abraham was a hundred years old, and many other credible and incredible rustic crimes and misdemeanors.

The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how 'people of faith' possess moral advantages that others can only envy.

be dire not just for the "holy German Fatherland." As he wrote, at the eleventh hour, "today, not only in peasant homes but also in the city sky-scrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms…. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!")

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.*6

he was praised from the clouds for showing his sturdy willingness to murder an innocent in expiation of his own crimes.

Evolution, he said, is smarter than you are. But this compliment to the intelligence of natural selection is not by any means a concession to the stupid notion of intelligent design. Some of the results are extremely impressive, as we are bound to think in our own case. ... But the process by which the results are attained is slow and infinitely laborious, and has given us a DNA string which is crowded with useless junk and which has much in common with much lower creatures.

The very best that can be said is that he uttered a string of fatuous non sequiturs. There is not even a strand of chewing gum to connect the premise to the conclusion;

To this day, religious people kill each other and kill each other's children for the right to exclusive property in this unidentifiable and unlocatable hole in a hill.

Nothing optional - from homosexuality to adultery - is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate.

One may be forcibly restrained from wicked actions, or barred from committing them, but to forbid people from contemplating them is too much.... If god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

There's nothing like not writing for making you unhappy.

the tree of liberty must be nurtured by the blood of tyrants, as well as of patriots).

I myself hope to live long enough to graduate from being a 'bad boy,' which I once was, to becoming a curmudgeon....

The Irishman shambles up to him and asks if there's any casual job going. "You don't look to me," says the supervisor, "as if you know the difference between a girder and a joist." "I do, too," says the Irishman indignantly. "The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses.

In the first half of the century, British intelligence was principally a machine for involving the United States in war on the British side.

The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both have a tendency to break religion's monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.

As a UC Berkeley alumni magazine headline neatly phrased it, 'Philosophy's Popularity Soars: Devotees Find It's More Than "An Interesting Path to Poverty"'.

My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven't had a reply yet.

all children are born into a losing struggle with death

La vida es azarosa e injusta, y el pecado, por muy original que sea, queda generalmente impune.

Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Everybody