Christopher Hitchens Quotes

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.

Credulity is belief in slight evidence, with no evidence, or against evidence.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.

Credulity without enquiry is a sure way to deceive oneself.

If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.

People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.

Logic is not satisfied with assertion. It cares nothing for the opinions of the great; nothing for the prejudices of the many, and least of all for the superstitions of the dead.

Incredulity is not wisdom.

I don't discount belief. I just discount most of the things that people believe in.

Most Christians are afraid that people will think for themselves; most atheists are afraid that they won’t.

Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.

Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.

Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.