Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchenswas an English-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 April 1949
CountryUnited States of America
One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.
The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.
The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.
Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.
I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.
For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
Of course, I do everything for money.
Religion of every kind involves the promise that the misery and futility of existence can be overcome or even transfigured. One might suppose that the possession of such a magnificent formula, combined with the tremendous assurance of a benevolent God, would make a person happy. But such appears not to be the case.: unease and insecurity and rage seem to keep up with blissful certainty, and even to outpace it.
Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.