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.
I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.
Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.
Victor invented me, in a way. He gave me a desk and a sponsor and a place to hang my hat, which was what I needed.