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Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

Christopher Hitchens

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Christopher Hitchens
Age: 62 †
Born: 1949
Born: April 13
Died: 2011
Died: December 15
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Political Scientist
Writer
Portsmouth
England
Christopher Eric Hitchens
Running
Astrology
Place
Astronomy
Ends
Chemistry
Runs
Begins
Philosophy
Analogy
Takes
Alchemy
Religion
Analogies

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled.
Christopher Hitchens
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This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.
Christopher Hitchens
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Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.
Christopher Hitchens
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Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.
Christopher Hitchens
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Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power.
Christopher Hitchens
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The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.
Christopher Hitchens
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If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn.
Christopher Hitchens
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What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.
Christopher Hitchens
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Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.
Christopher Hitchens
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I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.
Christopher Hitchens
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I'm very happy by myself - I'm lucky in that way - if I've got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.
Christopher Hitchens
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In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.
Christopher Hitchens
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If people I've never met or don't know say that what I've written or done or said means anything to them, then I'm happy to take it at face value, for once. It cheers me up.
Christopher Hitchens
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The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable to let some air into the discussion.
Christopher Hitchens
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There is no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot instantly be improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’.
Christopher Hitchens
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Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.
Christopher Hitchens
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Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
Christopher Hitchens
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Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.
Christopher Hitchens
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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
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The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.
Christopher Hitchens