Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptu- ous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience. There is one more charge to be added to the bill of indictment. With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.

The Bible commands us to love our enemies. I love the Pope very much.

I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. ... Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave.

croire en un dieu est une façon d'exprimer une disposition à croire en n'importe quoi. Tandis que rejeter la croyance n'est d'aucune manière professer que l'on ne croit en rien.

We now know things about our nature that the founders of religion could not even begin to guess at, and that would have stilled their overconfident tongues if they had known of them. Yet again, once one has disposed of superfluous assumptions, speculation about who designed us to be designers becomes as fruitless and irrelevant as the question of who designed that designer.

When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response - which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up - contains almost all that needs to be said on this point.

And even if my voice dies before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it's hello darkness my old friend.

And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it's hello darkness my old friend.

It is beyond doubt that wherever the United States needed to lose any kind of virginity in global affairs, the British were on hand with unguents and aphrodisiacs of all kinds.

I sympathise afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

Death is] one thing one is certainly born to do.

We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse.

Tertullian, one of the many church fathers who found it difficult to give a persuasive account of paradise, was perhaps clever in going for the lowest possible common denominator and promising that one of the most intense pleasures of the afterlife would be endless contemplation of the tortures of the damned. He spoke more truly than he knew in evoking the man-made character of faith.

No less an authority than Lavrenty Beria attacked the excesses of the Hungarian secret police (which must have stung a bit)

Prayers: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favour of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.

fueron capaces de señalar que si los triángulos tuvieran dioses, sus dioses tendrían tres lados

Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and in private, I 'was' my voice.

If something is worth bearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

Even in a country as broad-minded as Holland, the elders had preferred to make common cause with Christian anti-Semites and other obscurantists, rather than permit the finest of their number to use his own free intelligence.

Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don't. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.

There can be no doubt that the cult of death and the insistence upon portents of the end proceed from surreptitious desire to see it happen, and to put an end to the anxiety and doubt that always threaten the hold of faith.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory.

Hay días en que echo de menos mis antiguas convicciones como si se trataran de un miembro amputado. Pero, en términos generales, me siento mejor y no menos radical; y usted también se sentirá mejor, se lo garantizo, cuando abandone las doctrinas y permita que su mente, libre de cadenas, piense por sí misma.

Every single step toward the clarification of this argument has been opposed root and branch by the clergy.