Lexie > Lexie's Quotes

Showing 1-30 of 405

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 13 14 next »

#1

“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: alcohol, ancient-greeks, atheism, boredom, brotherhood, cana, christianity, entheos, food, hellenism, inspiration, iran, judaea, marriage-at-cana, miracles, mullahs, new-testament, omar-khayyam, oxford, passover, passover-seder, plato, reading, religion, symposia, wine, writing

245 likes

#2

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: brainwashing, critical-thinking, humor, independent-thought, truth, wisdom

369 likes

#3

“In one was, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely this reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”
― Christopher Hitchens

50 likes

#4

“When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as “Mother” Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of “Devil’s Advocate,” in order to fast‐track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: atheism, beatification, canonisation, deacons, devil, devil-s-advocate, fanatacism, monsignors, mother-teresa, pope, pope-john-paul-ii, priests, pro-bono, religion, sainthood, satan, testimony, vatican

115 likes

#5

“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

55 likes

#6

“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: afterlife, atheism, death, despair, eternal-life, heaven, hell, life, meaning-of-life, obituary

104 likes

#7

“Cheap booze is a false economy.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: alcohol, economy, value, wisdom

31 likes

#8

“Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers).
How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around).
What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: consciousness, death, languages, polyglots, questionnaires, talents, ugliness

20 likes

#9

“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

131 likes

#10

“Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,' as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you really don't remember, that's an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won't be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

tags: adorno, advice, alcoholism, alochol, drinking, drowning-one-s-sorrows, drugs, drunk-driving, eating, food, hangovers, martin-amis, men, responsibility, rules, scotch, single-malt, whiskey, women

164 likes

#11

“What can be asserted without proof can be dissmissed without proof.”
― Christopher Hitchens

9 likes

#12

“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

tags: atheism

65 likes

#13

“It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

tags: atheism, christianity, jerry-falwell, jesse-jackson, pluralism, religion, religious-right, separation-of-church-and-state, united-states, united-states-constitution

24 likes

#14

“Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

tags: argumentation, debate

154 likes

#15

“The finest fury is the most controlled.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

tags: anger, bob-dylan, control, fury, lonesome-death-of-hattie-carroll, music

74 likes

#16

“I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: 1-night-in-paris, celebrity-sex-tapes, eroticism, paris-hilton, pornography, sex

7 likes

#17

“There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: atheism, god, intelligent-design, religion

4 likes

#18

“People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: 2008, barack-obama, bigotry, gender, hillary-clinton, identity-politics, race, racism, sexism, skin-colour, tribalism, united-states-elections-2008

77 likes

#19

“There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: doris-lessing, language, literary-criticism, literature, truth

29 likes

#20

“Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.”
― Christopher Hitchens

72 likes

#21

“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

tags: ahteism, free-inquiry, humanism, science

130 likes

#22

“In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask for a doggie bag.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

tags: dog-meat, dogs, humour, korean-cuisine, north-korea, pyongyang

21 likes

#23

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

tags: atheism, philosophy

4627 likes

#24

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
― Richard Dawkins

1762 likes

#25

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

tags: bible, christianity, god, organized-religion, religion, yahweh

1908 likes

#26

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

tags: atheism, existentialism, follow-your-bliss, self-actualization, self-determination

1486 likes

#27

“Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off.

Note: Dawkins was quoting a former editor of New Scientist Magazine, who is as yet unidentified (possibly Jeremy Webb)”
― Richard Dawkins

tags: science

650 likes

#28

“Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.”
― Richard Dawkins

428 likes

#29

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

tags: death, inspirational, science, wonder

1876 likes

#30

“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
― Richard Dawkins

tags: institutions, organized-religion, religion, richard-dawkins

326 likes

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 13 14 next »

All Quotes

Lexie > Lexie's Quotes

Tags From Lexie’s Quotes