Farewell, great voice. Great voice of reason, of humanity, of humour. Great voice against can’t, against hypocrisy, against obscurantism and pretension, against all tyrants including God. Farewell, great warrior. You were in a foxhole, Hitch, and you did not flinch. Farewell, great example to us all.
~ Richard Dawkins
Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Mr. Hitchens was in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice that seemed at odds with his disheveled appearance. He was a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark. . .
Mr. Hitchens, a British Trotskyite who had lost faith in the Socialist movement, spent much of his life wandering the globe and reporting on the world’s trouble spots for The Nation magazine, the British newsmagazine The New Statesman and other publications. . .
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
English-American, Literary Critic, Journalist, Author,
Essayist, Polemicist, and Outspoken Anti-theist
The gods we have made are exactly the gods you would expect to be made from a species about a half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
English-American, Literary Critic, Journalist, Author,
Essayist, Polemicist, and Outspoken Anti-theist
Religion and the churches are manufactured, and this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. Ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it.
Hitchens himself was many things: a polemicist, reporter, author, rhetorician, militant atheist, drinker, name-dropper, and raconteur. He was also an absolutist. He liked a clear, defined target against which to take aim and fire; he knew what he wanted to write against and he did so with all the force and power of his formidable erudition and articulacy. Hitchens was an accomplished and prolific writer, but an even better speaker: his perfect sentences cascaded and tumbled, unstoppably. He was one of our greatest contemporary debaters, taking on all-comers on all subjects, except sport, in which he professed to have no interest at all. . .
An absence of doubt defines his work. His weaknesses are overstatement, especially when writing about what he despises (Islamism, God, pious moralizing of all kinds), self-righteous indignation (“shameful” and “shame”, employed accusatorily, are favoured words in his lexicon), narcissism, and failure to acknowledge or accept when he is wrong. His redeeming virtues are his sardonic wit, polymathic range, good literary style and his fearlessness. . .
The culture no longer throws up people like the Hitch. Today, he is very much a man apart. He has no equal in contemporary Anglo-American letters; there are followers and disciples but no heir apparent.
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
English-American, Literary Critic, Journalist, Author,
Essayist, Polemicist, and Outspoken Anti-theist
Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things because to demystify supposedly ‘holy text dictated by god’ and show that they are man-made and what you have to show is their internal inconsistencies and absurdities. One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority . . . it is an indispensable thing people can call it blasphemy if they like, but if they call it that they have to assume there is something to be blasphemed – some divine work, well I don’t accept the premise.
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
English-American, Literary Critic, Journalist, Author,
Essayist, Polemicist, and Outspoken Anti-theist
Organised religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
English-American, Literary Critic, Journalist, Author,
Essayist, Polemicist, and Outspoken Anti-theist
I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an anti-theist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion I do not wish, as some sentimental agnostics affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case.
Always Question Authority 