Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years?

The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious beliefin lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.

The most wonderful thing of all is that the distinguished Lutheran and Calvinist theologians who belong to our order really believe that they see in it (Illuminati) the true and genuine sense of Christian Religion. Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?

People are frightened of death, and the central lie of all religion is that there’s a cure for this and an exception we’ve made in your own case: an eternal life offered if you make the right propitiations and the right abjections. Well, I’m sorry. I think that it's the height of immorality to lie to people like that. That’s why [religion] survives.

It's when people begin using their religion as just a way of getting power over other people that scares me. I'm afraid that's what's going on in a lot of cases right now. When people deliberately tell lies, Creationism for instance, and pretend, "Oh, it's not really religion." I mean they know they're lying, and yet they're the religious people. There's something wrong there.

We are led to believe a lie When we see not through the eye.

In every sin, we choose to believe the devil's lie rather than God's truth.

Hope lies to mortals And most believe her, But man's deceiver Was never mine.

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.

A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.

In the first place, you shouldn't believe in promises. The world is full of them: the promises of riches, of eternal salvation, of infinite love. Some people think they can promise anything, others accept whatever seems to guarantee better days ahead, as, I suspect is your case. Those who make promises they don't keep end up powerless and frustrated, and exactly the fate awaits those who believe promises.

Dogma is a lie reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe that they believe what someone else believes.

It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.

You can believe something really hard,' Faith says, 'and still be wrong.

We are better deceived by having some truth told us than none.

People are stupid... They will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they're afraid it might be true.

Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Whoever believes in a man is very foolish.

Hypocrisy and distortion are passing currents under the name of religion

If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

Lie until even you believe it - that's the real secret of lying

It's human nature - we want to believe our children, our families, our President!

Smoke You stand infront of me, pretending to be solid, but you are nothing more than smoke and mirors. You said you'd never leave, that you would care for us forever, but now you claim you cannot stay? That you've been called away. When you go, who will i turn to when it all crashes down? Tell me who. Then tell me, how I can believe anone again, if all your promises have been lies.