Christopher Hitchens · 307 pages
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“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
Christopher Hitchens
Born place: in Portsmouth, England
Born date April 13, 1949
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“Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I’d think how girls’ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball-it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell-made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there’s no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there’s waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Prep
“I'm stronger than you are, Redd.”
― Frank Beddor, quote from The Looking Glass Wars
“I thought she wanted out. We should've brought cuffs and a gag." Clare frowned. "What's wrong with you, Blake? This is a rescue mission, not a kidnapping.”
― Jayde Scott, quote from A Job From Hell
“Why is everything an 'adventure' with you?" Sylvie said irritably to Izzie."
"Because life is an adventure, of course."
"I would say it was more of an endurance race," Sylvie said. "Or an obstacle course.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Life After Life
“I'm sorry, I don't know what any of you want, or why guns and knives are being waved around, or why the girl has just been taken hostage, but everyone seems to be acting like having a TALKING SKELETON in the room is perfectly normal. And you, where are your eyes? How can you see? How come the only people with eyes in this room are me and her?”
― Derek Landy, quote from The Faceless Ones
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