Christopher Hitchens Quotes

They all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett Even I. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death would be relief.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. This isn’t a good idea. This isn’t right.” “There’s all kinds of right,” he murmured. “On the spectrum, we’re still in the safe zone.” ... “Definitely right. Usually right,” Patch continued. “Mostly right. Maybe right.

If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.

Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.

I read these words which are the sum of all moral philosophy, and which cut short all the disputes of the casuists: When in doubt if an action is good or bad, refrain.

Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Conscience is the reason employed about questions of right and wrong.

I'm an atheist how unfortunate it is to assign responsibility to the higher up for justice amongst people.

It is easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.

It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist. ... I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.

Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.

The whole world is incapable of judging either right or wrong. but it is certain that actionless action can judge both right and wrong.

Even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse).

It is sometimes rational to do what is wrong, and sometimes irrational to do what is right

An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth; or it is an error: it can never be a crime or a virtue.

They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing.

I tell you, commander, it's true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.

Morality binds and blinds.