The Missionary Position Quotes

“The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves. Xenophanes”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“There should be philosophy and knowledge for the elect, religion and sentimentality for the masses”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Image and perception are everything, and those who possess them have the ability to determine their own myth, to be taken at their own valuation.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries—“without counting India”? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“I began the project of judging Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“This is a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Three years later, Mr. Turley has received no reply to his letter. Nor can anybody account for the missing money: saints, it seems, are immune to audit.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Government regulations required that an elevator be installed for the use of the disabled. Mother would not allow an elevator. The city offered to pay for the elevator. Its offer was refused. After all the negotiations and plans, the project for the poor was abandoned because an elevator for the handicapped was unacceptable.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“My own experience of Mother Teresa occurred when she was being honored at the 1989 luncheon meeting of the International Health Organization in Washington, D.C. During her acceptance speech, she spoke at length of her opposition to contraception and her activities to save the unwanted products of heterosexual activity. (She also touched on AIDS, saying she did not want to label it a scourge of God but that it did seem like a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.) Although she said that God could find it in his heart to forgive all sinners, she herself would never allow a woman or a couple who had had an abortion to adopt one of “her” babies. In her speech Mother Teresa frequently referred to what God wants us to think or do. As my table-mate (an MD from Aid to International Development) remarked to me: “Do you think it takes a certain amount of arrogance to assume that you have a direct line to God’s mind?” Is it going too far to liken Mother Teresa to some of our infamous televangelists, turning their audiences on to what is in God’s heart and mind while encouraging and accepting all donations?”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a “ticket to heaven.” An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Around $50 million had collected in one checking account in the Bronx…. Those of us who worked in the office regularly understood that we were not to speak about our work. The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives or on the lives of the poor we were trying to help.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“More lives were taken on purpose in the war on Nicaraguan “subversion” than have been saved by all the missionaries in Calcutta even by accident. Yet this brute utilitarian calculus is never employed against Mother Teresa, even by the sort of sophists who would deploy its moral and physical equivalent in her favor. So: silence on the death squads and on the Duvaliers and noisy complaint against the Sandinistas, and the whole act baptized as an apolitical intervention by someone whose kingdom is not of this world.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“When mass rapes occurred in the course of aggressive war in Bangladesh and later in Bosnia, Mother Teresa in the first case and the Pope in the second made strenuous appeals to the victims not to abort the seed of the invader and the violator.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God’s approval of Mother Teresa’s congregation. We were told that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life. Our bank account was already the size of a great fortune and increased with every postal service delivery. Around $50 million had collected in one checking account in the Bronx. . . . Those of us who worked in the office regularly understood that we were not to speak about our work. The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives or on the lives of the poor we were trying to help.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Bear in mind that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first-class clinics in Bengal. The decision not to do so, and indeed to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview. She described a person who was in the last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.” There are many people in the direst need and pain who have had cause to wish, in their own extremity, that Mother Teresa was less free with her own metaphysical caresses and a little more attentive to actual suffering.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Actions and words are judged by reputations, and not the other way around.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Christian America” that cares for people before they are born and after they are dead but is only interested in clerical coercion for the years in between,”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“But we do believe in religion—at least for other people. It is a means of marketing hope, and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“My initial impression was of all the photographs and footage I’ve ever seen of Belsen and places like that, because all the patients had shaved heads. No chairs anywhere, there were just these stretcher beds. They’re like First World War stretcher beds. There’s no garden, no yard even. No nothing. And I thought what is this? This is two rooms with fifty to sixty men in one, fifty to sixty women in another. They’re dying. They’re not being given a great deal of medical care. They’re not being given painkillers really beyond aspirin and maybe if you’re lucky some Brufen or something, for the sort of pain that goes with terminal cancer and the things they were dying of… They didn’t have enough drips. The needles they used and re-used over and over and over and you would see some of the nuns rinsing needles under the cold water tap. And I asked one of them why she was doing it and she said: “Well to clean it.” And I said, “Yes, but why are you not sterilizing it; why are you not boiling water and sterilizing your needles?” She said: “There’s no point. There’s no time.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“He Showed Up. Throughout his life and times, whenever and wherever something important was on the line, he presented himself.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“As Edward Gibbon observed about the modes of worship prevalent in the Roman world, they were “considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“In the Bronx, plans were being made to establish a new home for the poor. Many of the homeless were sick and needed more permanent accommodation than that offered by our night shelter. We had bought a large abandoned building from the city for one dollar. A co-worker offered to be the contractor and arranged for an architect to draw up plans for the renovations. Government regulations required that an elevator be installed for the use of the disabled. Mother would not allow an elevator. The city offered to pay for the elevator. Its offer was refused. After all the negotiations and plans, the project for the poor was abandoned because an elevator for the handicapped was unacceptable.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice