Quote

Religion fosters servility and solipsism.

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
Servility
Fosters
Atheism
Religion
Solipsism

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

Image
I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.
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
There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
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.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
The noble title of dissident must be earned rather than claimed it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
There are two clocks ticking in Iran. One is the democracy movement clock which is ticking now faster than it was but it's got a lot of catching up to do. And then there's the clock that's ticking towards a nuclear weaponry.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.
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
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
Image
For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
There's no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified there. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.
Christopher Hitchens
Image
Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.
Christopher Hitchens