The Four Horsemen Quotes

“Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“This is what I meant when I said the atheistic worldview requires intellectual courage. It requires moral courage, too. As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble. You are going to die, and you’ll never see your dead loved ones again. There’s no holy book to tell you what to do, tell you what’s right or wrong. You are an intellectual adult. You must face up to life, to moral decisions. But there is dignity in that grown-up courage. You stand tall and face into the keen wind of reality.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“Even the constantly reiterated insistence that we are miserable offenders, born in sin, is a kind of inverted arrogance: such vanity, to presume that our moral conduct has some sort of cosmic significance, as though the Creator of the Universe wouldn’t have better things to do than tot up our black marks and our brownie points.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“The great cultural project... may very well be to rescue what we have of the art and aesthetic of religion while discarding the supernatural.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don’t. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“That is not blind faith but just the opposite: faith continually tested, corrected and provisionally defended by the testimony of our senses and our common sense.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“I’m kind of grateful to the Anglican tradition for its benign tolerance... I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“As a UC Berkeley alumni magazine headline neatly phrased it, ‘Philosophy’s Popularity Soars: Devotees Find It’s More Than “An Interesting Path to Poverty”’.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“the testing of assertions on the anvils of logic and verifiable fact.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“religious dogmatism hinders the growth of honest knowledge and divides humanity to no necessary purpose. The latter is a dangerous irony, of course, because one of religion’s most vaunted powers is that it unites people. It does that too, but generally by amplifying tribalism and spawning moralistic fears that would not otherwise exist. The fact that sane men and women can often be found doing good for God’s sake is no rejoinder here, because faith gives them bad reasons for doing good when good reasons are available.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you’re ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“Why did I speak of intellectual courage? Because the human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have ‘just happened’. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.*6”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“The rules of all intellectual activity – whether scientific or non-scientific – spin down to one golden precept: the testing of assertions on the anvils of logic and verifiable fact. For an argument to obtain, it must make sense rationally and empirically.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“isn’t that theologians deliberately tell untruths. It’s as though they just don’t care about truth; aren’t interested in truth; don’t know what truth even means; demote truth to negligible status compared with other considerations, such as symbolic or mythic significance.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“wrong. Religious opinion is wrong by definition. We can’t avoid”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“The precision of ‘five’ breast feedings is typical of this kind of religious control-freakery. It surfaced bizarrely in a 2007 fatwa issued by Dr Izzat Atiyya, a lecturer at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, who was concerned about the prohibition against male and female colleagues being alone together and came up with an ingenious solution. The female colleague should feed her male colleague ‘directly from her breast’ at least five times. This would make them ‘relatives’ and thereby enable them to be alone together at work. Note that four times would not suffice. He apparently wasn’t joking at the time, although he did retract his fatwa after the outcry it provoked.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“the always lurking and now growing suspicion that the worst aspects of religion”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution

“His preternaturally fluent articulacy”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution