Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

Whether religion is man-made is a question for philosophers or theologians. But the forms are man-made. They are a human response to something. As a historian of religions, I am interested in those expressions.

My family is Jewish, Buddhist, Baptist and Catholic. I don't believe in man-made religions.

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the sermon on the mount.

Archaeologists have made discoveries that challenge fundamental traditions of Judaism as well as those of Christianity and Islam.

Our ideas are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people …. This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.

The Moslems say their Koran was written by God. The Hindus say the Vedas were; we say the Bible was, and we are but interested witnesses in deciding absolutely and exclusively for ourselves

Religion, born of the earth's need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.

I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.

Democritus's work on the void was revolutionary.

Nothing exists but atoms and the void.

Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin.

Where do we stand today compared to Greece circa 400 B.C.? Today's experiment-driven 'standard model' is not all that dissimilar to Democritus's speculative [sic] atomic theory.

Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.

Different religions meet the needs of different people

I think the Bible is completely inspired by God in its overall messages. But, for the people of those days to know what was going to happen 4,000 years later in a world of astronomy or subatomic particles. They didn't have access to the knowledge that we presently have about geology. So, we know now that the world was created many of billions of years ago, 13 or 14 billion years ago. As far as they knew, the earth was the center of the universe. They thought that stars were little twinkling things in the sky where as now we know stars are very distant and much larger than the earth.

Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.

A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; - nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.

What many people today assume Christianity to be is basically Plutarch plus Jesus.

The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together; and despite the vast variation in the world's religions, Wilson shows that religions always serve to coordinate and orient people's behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, sometimes for the purpose of competing with other groups.

He [Democritus] is probably best known for two of the most scientifically intuitive quotes ever uttered by an ancient: 'Nothing exists except atoms and space, everything else is opinion'.

Anything can be good. Even Last Action Hero could've been good. There's an idea somewhere in almost any movie : if you can find something that you love, then you can do it. If you can't, it doesn't matter how skilful you are.

Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound

Religion, like its votaries, while it exists on earth, must have a body as well as a soul. A religion purely spiritual might suit a being as pure, but men are compound animals; and the body too often lords it over the mind.