Quotes from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“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

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“ولدنا لنعاني لأننا ولدنا في العالم الثالث . المكان و الزمان مفروضان علينا . ما من شيء يمكن فعله سوى التحلي بالصبر”
― Shirin Ebadi, quote from Iran Awakening

“Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Right Wing Women

“She had a strange, wild beauty, a face that was disconcerting at first, but unforgettable. Her eyes in particular had an expression, at once voluptuous and fierce, that I have never seen on any human face. 'Gypsy's eye, wolf's eye' is a phrase Spaniards apply to people with keen powers of observation.”
― Prosper Mérimée, quote from Carmen

“I'd still be a goofy frog because, guess what, I like being a frog.”
― Dandi Daley Mackall, quote from My Boyfriends' Dogs: The Tales of Adam and Eve and Shirley

“Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.” When we “forget ourselves,” it is easy to write. We are not standing there, stiff as a soldier, our entire ego shimmied into every capital “I.” When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us. We retire as the self-conscious author and become something else—the vehicle for self-expression. When we are just the vehicle, the storyteller and not the point of the story, we often write very well—we certainly write more easily.”
― Julia Cameron, quote from The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life

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