Christopher Hitchens Quotes About Pain
-
Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.
→ -
"Objective" means that, in a confrontation with the evidence, you would be willing to change your own mind.
→ -
The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain.
→ -
It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us - waking and sleeping - who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, thought crime, just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick, as apparently we are - and then order us, on pain of eternal torture to be well again. To demand this, to wish this to be true is to wish to live as an abject slave.
→ -
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.
→ -
It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory
→
Related Authors
-
Stephen Fry Comedian -
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Activist -
Peter Hitchens Journalist -
Salman Rushdie Novelist -
William Lane Craig Philosopher -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
Mother Teresa Saint -
George Orwell Novelist -
Sam Harris Author -
Henry A. Kissinger Former National Security Advisor -
Noam Chomsky Linguist -
John Lennox Mathematician -
Bertrand Russell Philosopher -
Martin Amis Novelist -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist -
Dinesh D'Souza Author -
Lawrence M. Krauss Physicist -
William F. Buckley, Jr. Author -
Gore Vidal Writer