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
History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.
Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.
Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.
Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.
Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
No moral person would do such a thing unless they thought it was divinely warranted.
Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.
George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.
Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.
Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.