"If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species."
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Quote collection
Christopher Hitchens quotes (page 19 of 32)
626 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law."
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"The (Catholic) church, as far as I know, has not endorsed any war as just since it supported General Franco's invasion of Spain to destroy the Spanish republic with a Muslim mercenary army in the thirties, on the side of Hitler."
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"There are also people who say it's God's curse on me that I should have it near my throat because that was the organ of blasphemy which I used for so many years. I've used many other organs to blaspheme as well if it comes to that."
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"Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American someone who actually embodies all of those qualities."
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"Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt."
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"I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right."
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"Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world's monotheisms. It builds upon its primitive Jewish and Christian predecessors, selecting a chunk here and a shard there, and thus if these fall, it partly falls also."
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"David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism."
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"The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation, but the wrong culprit. Human sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus miracles attested to, and scapegoats - such as Jews or heretics or witches - hunted down and burned."
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"People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains."
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"Religion attacks us in our deepest integrity by saying we wouldn't be able to make a moral decision without it."
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"Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity."
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"One of the reasons I decided to apply for American citizenship after something like a quarter of century of living here on a British, European Union passport and a green card, was my identification with the United States in the post-September 11th period."
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"Friends call me Hitch. Maybe it can be turned into a 900-phone number. People would pay to talk to me."
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"The Russians are going to be expansionist whether we [USA] provoke them to it or not. Russians keep saying that we're trying to encircle them. In what sense does the independence of Kosovo, a land-locked province, former Yugoslavia, with no common border with Russia, threaten Russia with encirclement? This is insulting. In what sense does the independence of Georgia constitute an encirclement? What we are facing, and we may as well give it its right name, is what I called it earlier, a chauvinistic, theocratic in part, xenophobic Russian imperialism."
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"All this could be part of a plan. There is no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn't it? With mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time. And all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination, in order that the pope can tell people not to jerk off."
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"Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'"
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"To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds."
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"She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director."
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