Quotes · Skopia

10 quotes

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Religious literature

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

Christopher Hitchens

God is Not Great · 2007

★ 5.2

Essay · Religious literature

Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Christopher Hitchens

The Portable Atheist · 2007

★ 5.1

I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.

George Meredith

1859

★ 3.6

What a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature.

George Meredith

1885

★ 3.6

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

Christopher Hitchens

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything · 2007

★ 3.6

You never reach the promised land. You can march towards it.

James Callaghan

1976

★ 3.5

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.

Richard Aldington

The Colonel's Daughter · 1931

★ 3.5

Essay · Academic journal

The secular State is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

Christopher Hitchens

1998

★ 1.9

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the "transcendent" and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mamals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

Christopher Hitchens

2001

★ 1.8

There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change-and it is for Mrs. Thatcher.

James Callaghan

1979

★ 1.7