Quotes by Christopher Hitchens

I dont think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

WASP is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so its inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. Its a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

The advice Ive been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you cant give up politics, it wont give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.

Im afraid the SSs relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, its a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

“I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression killing time. Its a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.”

“It was well said—by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think—that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone ones awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being waterboarded and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable.”

“It is truth, in the old saying, that is the daughter of time, and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that history had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.”

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16”

“So this is where all the vapid talk about the soul of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The vacuum will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.”

“There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.”

“And 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 rely solely 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.”