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

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Popular quotes

“She’d built her entire life around the idea that the only thing she could control was herself—her actions, her words. And, if she did the right thing, other people would somehow treat her with the same respect. But it wasn’t true, now, was it? Her decency made no difference at all in anyone’s life but hers.”
― Lauren Stewart, quote from Hyde

“Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. The fact that these two processes must run on the same platform means that we are sometimes confused about which one is running. We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we’ll feel when we get there, but in fact, what we feel as we imagine the future is often a response to what’s happening in the present.”
― Daniel Todd Gilbert, quote from Stumbling on Happiness

“The holy book he’d spent so much of his life preaching from had one cruel flaw: it was not very good at offering encouragement or hope to those who weren’t religious.”
― Michel Faber, quote from The Book of Strange New Things

“I released a breath I didn’t remember holding. Turned to Ben.
Found him looking at me, face inches from mine on Sewee’s deck.
Panic flared, white hot, paralyzing me as I lay beside him.
Our gazes met. I saw fear in his dark brown eyes. Indecision. Doubt.
Ben went rigid, his chest rising and falling like a bellows. Then something changed. His face relaxed, a small smile playing on his lips.
Before I could blink, his mouth covered mine.
We shared a breath. A tingle ran my spine.
Then I pulled back, breathing hard, unsure what either my mind or body were doing.
Ben’s unsure look returned. Then vanished.
He pulled me near again, his lips melting into mine. Strong, calloused fingers stroked the side of my face. His smell enveloped me. Earthy. Masculine. Ben.
Fire rolled through my body.
So this is what it’s like.
I broke away again, gasping slightly for breath. Reality crashed home.
I sat up and scooted a few feet away, rubbing my face with both hands. What was I doing?
“Ben, I—”
His hand rose to cut me off. He leaned against the bench, face suddenly serious. “I’m not going to pretend anymore. One way or another, I’m going to say how I feel.” Ben snorted softly. “Make my case.”
We sat still in the darkness, Sewee rocking gently, the scene dream-like and surreal.
“You don’t have to make a case.” I stared at my shoes, had no idea where I wanted this conversation to go. “It’s just, things are—”
“YO!”
Our heads whipped in the voice’s direction. Ben scrambled to a crouch, scanning the silent bulk of Tern Point, as if just now recalling we were adrift at sea.
The voice called down again, suddenly familiar. “What, are you guys paddling around the island? I don’t have a boat license, but that seems dumb.”
“Shut up, Hi!” Ben shouted, with more heat than was necessary. Scowling, he slid behind the controls and fired the engine.
I scurried to the bow, as far from the captain’s chair as I could manage and stay dry.
You’ve done it now, Tory Brennan. Better hope there’s a life preserver somewhere.
A glance back. Ben was watching me, looking for all the world like he had more to say.
I quickly turned away.
Nope. Nope nope nope.
I needed some time to think about this one. Perhaps a decade?
“Where are we?” I asked, changing the subject.
Ben must’ve sensed that my “personal” shop was closed for business.”
― Kathy Reichs, quote from Terminal

“For a moment we're both silent, staring. I wonder if either of us really sees the other clearly anymore or if we stuck looking at the frozen images of who we used to be.”
― Emily Henry, quote from The Love That Split the World

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