Christopher Hitchens Quotes

44 percent of the American People actually believe that Jesus, a historical figure, is sometime in the next 50 years, going to come down from the sky like some superhero, get the bad guys, and all will be right with the world.

Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party.

I never thought I would write about the Book of Revelation. It's so dense; it's so complex and puzzling. But then I found I was thinking about a number of themes, one of which has to do with politics and religion.

The Seventh Day Adventist Church believes that it was specially chosen by God to prepare the world for the Second Coming of His Son Jesus.

A poll earlier this year showed that 42 per cent of Americans believe we're in the End Times.

A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college.

The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.

The tension between the essence of spiritual teachings and the harmful fundamentalism that often arises in the name of religion is an issue that has engaged my mind practically as far back as I can remember.

Let God take care of history. Don’t force it by some sort of whacky alliance between the religious right and Israel in order to bring about some Biblical prophesy.

With the coming of the next millennium, some religious/apocalyptic groups or individuals may turn to violence as they seek to achieve dramatic effects to fulfill their prophecies.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ.

The goal of the fundamentalists is to switch off the light and make us see by the flame of one candle.

If the Shiites in a Sunni-dominated country insisted on practicing their religion openly, then … the Sunni state had no choice but to wage war on them.

Militant Christians and Muslims alike see themselves as the only remaining challengers to the agnosticism of an increasingly secular world.

Is it possible to have a grown-up debate about the failings of Islam, Christianity and Judaism? And how do you offer criticisms of Islam in particular without appearing - however unintentionally - to back up some very nasty stereotypes and prejudices?

Adherents of almost all religions, as they move away in time from the source, are invariably known to have employed coercion either to keep people within the fold of their religion, or to convert others into their faith.

To crown the whole folly of the Mormons, in the Spring of 1844, Joe Smith announced himself as a candidate for President of the United States, and many of his followers were confident he would be elected. He next caused himself to be anointed king and priest, and to give character to his pretensions, he declared his lineage in an unbroken line from Joseph, the son of Jacob, and that of his wife from some other important personae of the ancient Hebrews.

There are in America from fifteen to twenty million religious fundamentalists who are dedicated to doctrines incompatible with democracy in that they insist on their prerogatives as first principles. An even larger group feebly follows the trail of fire breathed by those fundamentalists. They are the most dangerous minority we have because they categorically eschew the reasoned judgments of the majority. Democracy properly allows them the right to worship as they choose. It should never have conceded them the right to establish schools. Education is not a function of any church—-or even of a city—-or a state; it is a function of all mankind.

I would like to regard the Inquisition as an aberration as far as Christian history is concerned. And I think the Taliban would be an aberration as far as contemporary Muslim civilization is concerned

It was not, as I have said, that we attacked religious fundamentalists, but that they felt themselves obliged to attack us. For the attempt to lead the moral life, or even to try to lead a better moral life, without first accepting religious dogmas was to their way of thinking monstrous.

I am entirely of the opinion that the papacy is the Antichrist.

So many of the people killed in the world have been killed in religious conflicts. There is no more dangerous person in the world than someone who is doing what God has commanded.

Eventually an effective political ideology cannot be based on any certain religion. Religion can offer some contribution, but an entire political activism cannot be oriented in accordance with religion. Political history of this region has the example of religion-based politics attempted in Pakistan and it failed. Not only in Islam, people in other religions of many regions try to keep on politics based on religion. It's not right.