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Christopher Hitchens Quotes - Page 6

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If you can charm everyone it means you don't care about anyone in particular.

If you can charm everyone it means you don't care about anyone in particular.

Christopher Hitchens
Mean, Care, Charm

She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

Christopher Hitchens
Directors, Kind, Imagine

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Christopher Hitchens
Giving, Risk, Want

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
Believe, White, People

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, 'Well, good on you. See you there.'

Christopher Hitchens
People, Praying, Torture

I'm not afraid of being dead, that's to say there's nothing to be afraid of. I won't know I'm dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I'm alive in any way at all, that'll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.

Christopher Hitchens
Strong, Would Be, Alive
"Christopher Hitchens discusses life, death, cancer and God in interview with Newsnight". Newsnight interview, www.bbc.co.uk. November 26, 2010.

I personally want to "do" death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.

Christopher Hitchens
Death, Eye, Looks
Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.18, Atlantic Books Ltd

Atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it.

Christopher Hitchens
Atheist, World, This World
Christopher Hitchens (2007). “The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever”, p.11, Da Capo Press

All of life is a wager

Christopher Hitchens
Wagers, Life Is

The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.

Christopher Hitchens
Discovery, Korea, Religion

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.

Christopher Hitchens
Successful, Looks, Lines

Those who want to be offended don't have the right to try and close down the newspaper that offends them.

Christopher Hitchens
Trying, Want, Newspapers

[Concerning monotheistic religions] The only thing these hysterical cults have in common is the belief that this world will be consumed, and deservedly so, when the moment is ripe. They also, all of them, profess a great disdain for earthly possessions. Yet they pass the intervening time in haggling over the most trivial and paltry property rights, over caves and rocks and disputable pieces of archeological rubbish.

Christopher Hitchens
Rights, Rocks, Caves

It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.

Christopher Hitchens
Bullying, Hate, Expression
"Rushdie and After" by David Remnick, www.newyorker.com. September 16, 2012.

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
Atheist, Mass Destruction, Order

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries.

Christopher Hitchens
Father, Son, Views

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

Christopher Hitchens
Struggle, Sleep, Anxiety
Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays”, p.65, Atlantic Books Ltd

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do

Christopher Hitchens
Faithful, Church, Mosques
Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.14, Atlantic Books Ltd

I would say that if you don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you're really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Christopher Hitchens
Christian, Meaningful, Jesus
Christopher Hitchens (2017). “Christopher Hitchens: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations”, p.80, Melville House

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

Christopher Hitchens
Atheist, Men, Atheism
Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.96, Atlantic Books Ltd

I am, I hope, never offensive by accident.

Christopher Hitchens
Offensive, Accidents

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
Philosophy, School, May

I'm a single-issue voter, to get straight to the point. I'm really only interested in the candidate who's toughest and least apologetic when it comes to the confrontation with Islamic Jihadism.

Christopher Hitchens
Islamic, Issues, Voters
Source: www.npr.org

Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

Christopher Hitchens
Children, Thinking, Order
Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.67, Atlantic Books Ltd

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 would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.

Christopher Hitchens
Jesus, Father, Teaching

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