Christopher Hitchens · 98 pages
Rating: (7.4K votes)
“The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves. Xenophanes”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“I began the project of judging Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“There should be philosophy and knowledge for the elect, religion and sentimentality for the masses”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries—“without counting India”? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“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”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“Government regulations required that an elevator be installed for the use of the disabled. Mother would not allow an elevator. The city offered to pay for the elevator. Its offer was refused. After all the negotiations and plans, the project for the poor was abandoned because an elevator for the handicapped was unacceptable.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“This is a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
Christopher Hitchens
Born place: in Portsmouth, England
Born date April 13, 1949
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“Well then, as your boyfriend, I order you to tell Zane that you are and always have been my girlfriend." -Fenn”
― Candace Knoebel, quote from Embracing the Flames
“Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart”
― quote from Holy Bible: New International Version
“In science knowledge comes first and then faith follows. In spirituality faith comes first and then knowledge follows. The knowledge that pesticides and chemical fertilizers are good for plants came through science. Based on this knowledge, people had faith in pesticides and fertilizers and they were used all over the world. Then a different knowledge came and faith shifted to organic farming. Knowledge brought faith, the knowledge changed, and then faith changed. The knowledge and faith of science is of "happening." In spirituality, faith is first and knowledge comes later.”
― Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, quote from Celebrating Silence: Excerpts from Five Years of Weekly Knowledge 1995-2000
“With the indie kids you have to remember this: they really think that what they do matters in some way. They reckon that history will care. (They don’t know that history will have other shit to be getting on with.) The indie kids figure that they’re passing on the torch or some fucking thing. That, just as they were influenced by someone—the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, the Stooges, whoever—then, in the future, young bands will be influenced by them. Maybe so. Maybe a few thousand malnourished cockless freaks scattered around the globe will give a shit. So what? Real people don’t..”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“Knowing that another path might have been easier for him to travel, but that it couldn’t possibly have offered a more satisfying conclusion.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
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