God Is Not Great Quotes

“Book of Mormon”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Ethan Smith’s”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“This then popular work by a pious loony, claiming that the American Indians originated in the Middle East, seems to have started the other Smith on his gold-digging in the first place.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The latter, which honors Abraham’s willingness to make a human sacrifice of his son, is common to all three monotheisms, and descends from their primitive ancestors.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The prelude involves a series of vilenesses and delusions, from the seduction of Lot by both his daughters to the marriage of Abraham to his stepsister, the birth of Isaac to Sarah when Abraham was a hundred years old, and many other credible and incredible rustic crimes and misdemeanors.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“he was praised from the clouds for showing his sturdy willingness to murder an innocent in expiation of his own crimes.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“To this day, religious people kill each other and kill each other’s children for the right to exclusive property in this unidentifiable and unlocatable hole in a hill.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Every single step toward the clarification of this argument has been opposed root and branch by the clergy.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Mother Teresa”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“the strenuous and dogmatic is the moral enemy of the good.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“god.)”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“the gore-soaked landscape of the Old Testament.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Maimonides”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“divine” law.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“god”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Abd al-Aziz bin Baz, the late grand mufti of Saudi Arabia,”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“so much the greater is the triumph of faith in nevertheless believing.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Thomas Paine was not wrong in saying that he could not believe in any religion that shocked the mind of a child.)”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Even in a country as broad-minded as Holland, the elders had preferred to make common cause with Christian anti-Semites and other obscurantists, rather than permit the finest of their number to use his own free intelligence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“In other words, a handful of religious bullies and bigmouths could, so to speak, outvote the tradition of free expression in its Western heartland.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Then again, on another day, one might open the newspaper to read that the largest study of prayer ever undertaken had discovered yet again that there was no correlation of any kind between “intercessory” prayer and the recovery of patients. (Well, perhaps some correlation: patients who knew that prayers were being said for them had more postoperative complications than those who did not, though I would not argue that this proved anything.)”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Meanwhile, the hoarse proponents of “intelligent design” would be laying siege to yet another school board, demanding that tripe be taught to children.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“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. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically:”
― Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The daughters of the high priest Anius changed whatever they chose into wheat, wine or oil. Athalida, daughter of Mercury, was resuscitated several times. Aesculapius resuscitated Hippolytus. Hercules dragged Alcestis back from death. Heres returned to the world after passing a fortnight in hell. The parents of Romulus and Remus were a god and a vestal virgin. The Palladium fell from heaven in the city of Troy. The hair of Berenice became a constellation.… Give me the name of one people among whom incredible prodigies were not performed, especially when few knew how to read and write.—VOLTAIRE, MIRACLES AND IDOLATRY”
― 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. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.”
― 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

“In verse 2 of the immediately following chapter, god tells Moses to instruct his followers about the conditions under which they may buy or sell slaves (or bore their ears through with an awl) and the rules governing the sale of their daughters. This is succeeded by the insanely detailed regulations governing oxen that gore and are gored, and including the notorious verses forfeiting “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Micromanagement of agricultural disputes breaks off for a moment, with the abrupt verse (22:18) “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christian torture and burning of women who did not conform.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined—as I hope—I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. 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

“The Roman Catholic Church in particular is having to answer this question in the most painful of ways, by calculating the monetary value of child abuse in terms of compensation. Billions of dollars have already been awarded, but there is no price to be put on the generations of boys and girls who were introduced to sex in the most alarming and disgusting ways by those whom they and their parents trusted. “Child abuse” is really a silly and pathetic euphemism for what has been going on: we are talking about the systematic rape and torture of children, positively aided and abetted by a hierarchy which knowingly moved the grossest offenders to parishes where they would be safer. Given what has come to light in modern cities in recent times, one can only shudder to think what was happening in the centuries where the church was above all criticism. But what did people expect would happen when the vulnerable were controlled by those who, misfits and inverts themselves, were required to affirm hypocritical celibacy? And who were taught to state grimly, as an article of belief, that children were “imps of” or “limbs of” Satan? Sometimes the resulting frustration expressed itself in horrible excesses of corporal punishment, which is bad enough in itself. But when the artificial inhibitions really collapse, as we have seen them do, they result in behavior which no average masturbating, fornicating sinner could even begin to contemplate without horror. This is not the result of a few delinquents among the shepherds, but an outcome of an ideology which sought to establish clerical control by means of control of the sexual instinct and even of the sexual organs. It belongs, like the rest of religion, to the fearful childhood of our species.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The point is that Socrates was mocking his accusers in their own terms, saying in effect: I do not know for certain about death and the gods—but I am as certain as I can be that you do not know, either.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything