Quotes from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“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). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The most educated person in the world now has to admit-- I shall not say confess-- that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the 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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“There but for the grace of God,' said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, 'go I.' What this apparently compassionate observation really means--not that it really 'means' anything--is, 'There by the grace of God goes someone else.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

About the author

Popular quotes

“My first choice would be to give you more god children, but that would be far too cruel a thing to do—to them.”
― Allison Tebo, quote from The Reluctant Godfather

“But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what’s going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Give bad news swiftly, and spread out the good news. Machiavelli.” Charpentier”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Great Reckoning

“The final problem is called overdetermination (or, sometimes, multiple sufficient causes). Consider a firing squad that dispatches the condemned man with perfectly synchronized shots. If the first shooter had not fired, the prisoner would still be dead, so under the counterfactual theory his shot didn't cause the death. But the same is true of the second shooter, the third, and so on, with the result that none of them can be said to have caused the prisoner's death. But that is just crazy.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Back when I was in college, I wrote a short story called “The Albuquerque Door” for a junior year creative writing class. It dealt with several of the same ideas in this book, but with a much smaller cast of characters and on a much less talented level. Needless to say, it didn’t go over well with the instructor’s “literary” tastes, and while I didn’t agree with him on a lot of his points, it left me feeling bad enough about the story that I just filed it away.”
― Peter Clines, quote from The Fold

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.