Quotes from Christopher Hitchens

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than an atheist does.

Why did I speak of intellectual courage? Because the human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have 'just happened'. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice.

English muffin, a confection so grim that it could not have been sold in England even in wartime.

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge ( as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs.)

It was never that difficult to see that religion was a cause of hatred and conflict, and that its maintenance depended upon ignorance and superstition

We too have unalterable convictions. We too have principles we're willing to fight for, die for, kill for if you like or if you insist. Don't mistake our pluralism, our tolerance and our multiculturalism for weaknesses. We have convictions and principles and we can be offended as well, we can be offended.

The great thing about writing a book is that it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They come to your bookstore events and give you things to read that you should have read already. It's this dialectical process that makes me glad I chose the profession I did: a free education that goes on for a lifetime.

When the British fleet patrolled the oceans and upheld Imperial Preference, and the King was the Emperor of India, an overfondness for things English could expose the American addict to ridicule and even contempt.

When intellectuals and artists withdraw from the fray, politicians feel safer.

the strenuous and dogmatic is the moral enemy of the good.

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts … and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own … Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

The two most obvious English mutations to have occurred in America in the last decade go by the names punk and skinhead.

Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you're ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found

Tertullian put it, either disarmingly or annoyingly according to your taste. I believe it because it is absurd. It is impossible to quarrel seriously with such a view. If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.

Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in paradise—indeed it has never been able to evolve a tempting heaven at all—but it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic and everlasting punishment for sexual backsliders, which is nearly as revealing in making the same point in a different way.

the gore-soaked landscape of the Old Testament.

The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage rather than resignation. In a sense, with the back to the wall and no exit but death or acceptance, the options narrow to one.

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.

I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation - is that good for the world?

If I was told to sacrifice something to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said 'Yes I'll gut my kid to show my love of God.'

Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.