It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
Author
Christopher Hitchens
65 quotations
About Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British and American author and journalist. Known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence", is used in philosophy and law.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Christopher HitchensTo terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?
For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.
I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.
There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator …
A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.
I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
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I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.
Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same wo…
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a go…
My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don'…
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.
If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.
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. …
I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.
I don't 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 …
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.
A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be th…
Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.
Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense o…
I'm afraid the SS's 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.