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"I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves."
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Exlpore more Skepticism quotes
"Brand-new truths are probably not Truths."
"I don't like psychiatrists, Alecto told her. "Not because they don't think I'm real, but because they have no idea what they're doing."
"The wrong approaches to faith and to skepticism are equally detrimental to the path. For the former declares its answers too soon and is later found false, the latter rejects sound answers altogether and hashes itself useless."
"Science is not a democracy. Therefore to try to pass of global warming as real just because "98% of scientists say they agree" makes no sense at all. If 98% of psychiatrists said that all mentally ill people needed lobotomized, does that make it true? If 98% of your friends jumped off a building, would you jump, too?"
"Never trust a high altitude astronomer."
"Doubter wants proof which contributes nothing to her faith."
"We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts."
"There is no UFO and also there is no alien, at least not in common mind nor reference."
"Doubt is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness."
"There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that's still beyond logic of the observer."
Explore more quotes by Christopher Hitchens
"Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope-and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing-that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so."
"Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries."
"One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either."
"The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies."
"In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust."
"The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book."
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