Quotes About Christopher Hitchens

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.

My hope is that literature can replace religion as the source of our ethics, without ceasing to be a pleasurable study and pursuit in its own right

Everything I love: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

One of my first reservations about Zionism was and is that, semiconsciously at least, it grants the anti-Semite's first premise about the abnormality of the Jew.

Created sick, and then commanded to be well." This is one of the first, easiest, and most obvious of the satirical maxims that eventually lay waste to the illusion of faith.

Fuck off, some of them seem to be yelling at coalition forces. A lot hinges on the appropriate military response. Fuck you might be risky. OK, off we fuck, then might buy some valuable time.

Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.

Incidentally, I have also learned a bit about the importance of avoiding feminine embarrassment ('Daddy,' wrote Sophia when she enrolled at the New School where I teach, 'people will ask why is old Christopher Hitchens kissing that girl?') and shall now cease and desist.

At the time, the United States had an attorney general named John Ashcroft, who had stated that America had "no king but Jesus" (a claim that was exactly two words too long).

Three years later, Mr. Turley has received no reply to his letter. Nor can anybody account for the missing money: saints, it seems, are immune to audit.

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

Remember that it is 'free-thinking Jews,' not Jews as such, who are defined as the undesirables by T.S. Eliot in After Strange Gods .

There is, especially in the American media, a deep belief that insincerity is better than no sincerity at all.

Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him.

It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring.

He is in many ways quite a right-wing isolationist. It's because some people are naïve enough to confuse this with anti-imperialism that they think of him as being rather more to the left than he really is.

I've always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don't really respect anyone who falls for Camelot.

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

To begin with a summary of Paine's astonishing life and career is to commence with a sense of wonder that he was ever able to emerge at all.

Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility and abjection, requiring you to regard yourself as conceived and born in sin and owing a duty to a stern creator. But in return, it places you at the center of the universe and assures you that you are the personal object of a heavenly plan.

Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearful, partially formed animals with a terror of death and the dark

How much vanity must be concealed-not too effectively at that- in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?