Quote

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

Christopher Hitchens

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Laugh
Authority
Laughing
Ability
Mockery
Religion
Emancipation
Human
Beginnings
Humans
Essential
Things
Essentials

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

Image
No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
I'd like to prove to other people that it's not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
I wrote a piece from North Korea called Visit to a Small Planet which is a line I stole from a play of Gore Vidal's, because it did seem to me as if I had left this planet completely to go on this visit to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, and it was as if coming back from another spatial body altogether.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
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
Image
I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
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
Image
To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
I'm a member of no party. I have no ideology. I'm a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that's all around us.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.
Christopher Hitchens