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"I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim-so modestly and so humbly-to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world."
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"Any thought sequence that minimizes anxiety would get reinforced over time. The sequence would be maintained during the person's development and would be provoked in contexts where refutation of the belief might occur. So, any kind of refutation of a person's religious beliefs makes the beliefs only stronger."

"Belief is indeed psychologically important for the human mind of general population, but that belief should be nicely compatible with scientific reasoning, otherwise that belief turns into prejudice, which is never beneficial to the human life."

"Whatever may be the position of science, whatever may be the position of philosophy, as long as there is such a thing as death in the world, as long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, as long as the human heart sheds a drop of tear in weakness, there shall be a faith in God and divinity."

"Deep scientific psychoanalysis reveals that excessive beliefs and dependence on religion is a superstition and fear induced psychiatric disease."

"Wrong belief is what bites one from the inside. There is no one biting him on the outside."

"It feels great to know that whatever you need to achieve your dreams are in you. Whatever the spider needs to make a cobweb is not in the housefly. Look to yourself, you have what it takes to weave your success!"

"I had also read somewhere that if a man didn't truly believe or understand what he was espousing, somehow he could do a more convincing job."
Explore more quotes by Christopher Hitchens

"And 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 rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake."

"How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?"

"Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry, here in the USA it seemed to be true that if you dared to give things 'your best shot' then the other much-used phrases like 'land of opportunity' would kick in as well."

"An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives."

"My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them."

"We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books."

"I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us."

"The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind."

"The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book."
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