God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

by Christopher Hitchens

If one comprehends the fallacies of any “revealed” religion, one comprehends them all.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

strongly recommend that you read part III, chapter 38, and part IV, chapter 44, for yourselves,

“The sleep of reason,” it has been well said, “brings forth monsters.”

Those who become bored by conventional “Bible” religions, and seek “enlightenment” by way of the dissolution of their own critical faculties into nirvana in any form, had better take a warning. They may think they are leaving the realm of despised materialism, but they are still being asked to put their reason to sleep, and to discard their minds along with their sandals.

All he really “knew,” he said, was the extent of his own ignorance. (This to me is still the definition of an educated person.)

All major confrontations over the right to free thought, free speech, and free inquiry have taken the same form—of a religious attempt to assert the literal and limited mind over the ironic and inquiring one.

The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth.

In other words, a handful of religious bullies and bigmouths could, so to speak, outvote the tradition of free expression in its Western heartland.