Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Theology is ignorance with wings.

All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

... what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.

Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.

I am not an atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.

God made all the animals in a single day; he could have swept them all away in the flood and re-created them in one day when they were again needed. Therefore it was an odd idea to save specimens of them for eleven months in the ark, whilst aware that eight persons could not feed or water them by any human possibility. If they were to be preserved by miracle, the ark was not necessary - to let them swim would have answered the purpose and been more indubitably miraculous.

He said, first let's just unzip your religion down.

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.

Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned

When they say I'm a great actor, I close my ears because it's not good for you to think that way.

All of us should be much more humble and contrite when we point the finger at somebody else, because four more fingers are pointing back at us.

When a person feels disposed to over estimate his own importance, let him remember that mankind got along very well before his birth, and that in all probability they will they will get along very well after his death.

Pointing out that countless great mathematicians had tried to solve the problem and failed before you came along is in particularly bad taste and should be avoided completely.

Obviously, the arrogance of my own nature in regards to other people's work would suggest that I think I'm talented.

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky.

Well I wasn't really attacking the religious beliefs [in the song 'The Vatican Rag'], I was attacking the formality of the rituals of the Catholic church; however, people took it wrongly.

Almost all theological thought is anthropocentric and I just cannot buy into the anthropocentric ideology. Basically we're a bunch of conceited apes.

Atheism: the religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority.

I am egotistical, that I won't deny...I do think I'm good - in fact, I know I'm good...but I know that I don't appeal to everybody.

The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.

And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That's the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.

Priests ... these turkey-cocks of God.