Christopher Hitchens, the 62-year-old writer, intellectual, lecturer and noted atheist with the British accent and lightning-fast mind who was known as “Hitch” to his friends, died yesterday of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer.
You don’t have to be a heathen to mourn Christopher Hitchens’ death. Yes, those who reject organized religion and deny the existence of God have lost one of their most provocative and eloquent spokespeople. But Hitchens wrote and lectured on a variety of topics and even those who attend church religiously must admit that he was supremely talented – absolutely brilliant, in fact – and his departure from the planet creates a void.
He wasn’t just a gifted author of 11 books and several collected essays, pamphlets and collaborative works; he could think on his feet and immediately respond to a question or assertion with facts, wit and often irrefutable posits and anecdotes that rendered his questioner or debater impotent and speechless. He had such power, personality and staggering intellect. It’s possible that he was insufferable in person, as those who are aware of their awesome intelligence or pleased with what they have achieved in life can be – although from what I’ve read, he wasn’t – but I still would have liked to have personally met, talked with, listened to and learned from him. It’s not every day that we can share air with true genius.
I didn’t agree with Hitchens about everything – he supported hawkish neoconservative
Paul Wolfowitz and the Iraq war, insulted
Cindy Sheehan and rooted for Ralph Nader for president in 2000 – but I respect him like few others, not only for his smarts and wit but for the self-confidence and courage that it took to appear on national television or stand before hostile audiences and slice their realities to bits, to turn people’s deeply-held convictions upside down and inside out in less time than it takes me to reboot my laptop. He challenged listeners and readers, made important points, shared unique insights, rejected the ridiculous and warned that the barbarians weren’t merely at the gates, they were well inside, having been let in by the faithful.
As one friend posted in Facebook after Hitchens’ death became known, “We all saw this coming yet it is never easy.” (He interrupted a book tour to undergo treatment for his cancer in June of 2010.) Indeed, it’s hard not to feel sad or even downright depressed when someone like Hitchens or Steve Jobs or
Dennis Ritchie or
Geraldine Ferraro or Betty Ford or
Jack LaLanne or
Gil Scott-Heron or
Howard Zinn dies and you know the world will never be the same, that someone who may be imitated but never duplicated has left this mortal plane, someone who in one way or another made life better, made a lasting contribution.
Here are some quotes that reveal Christopher Hitchens’ brilliance (I tried to choose a favorite but couldn’t so they’re listed in no particular order):
“Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends and astronomy begins.”
"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. 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."
“Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.”
"[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."
"The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals."
“That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?”
“To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.”
“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think – though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one – that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.”
“Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.”
“For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick.”
“[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”
“The gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.”
“I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.”
“Organized 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.”
“We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.”
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”
“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”
“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 own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”
“Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”
“It [Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.”
“When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as 'Mother' Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of 'Devil’s Advocate,' in order to fast-track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono.”
“Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life – except religion.”
“If I was told to sacrifice [my three children] to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said, ‘Yes, I’ll gut my kid to show my love of God,’ I’d say, ‘No, fuck you!’"
“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.”
“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.”
