God Is Not Great Quotes

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“One must state it plainly. 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 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 (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The most educated person in the world now has to admit-- I shall not say confess-- that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The idea of a utopian state on earth, perhaps modeled on some heavenly ideal, is very hard to efface and has led people to commit terrible crimes in the name of the ideal.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, "no child's behind left.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything