Good and evil Quote by Christopher Hitchens

““Populous cities are destroyed by earthquakes, and desolated by pestilence. Ambition is every where devoting its millions to incalculable calamity. Superstition, in a thousand shapes, is employed in brutalizing and degrading the human species, and fitting it to endure without a murmur the oppression of its innumerable tyrants. All this is abstractedly neither good nor evil because good and evil are words employed to designate that peculiar state of our own perceptions, resulting from the encounter of any object calculated to produce pleasure or pain. Exclude the idea of relation, and the words good and evil are deprived of import.””

Christopher Hitchens

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 2.0 out of 5 (7 ratings)

Good and evil

More by Christopher Hitchens

“The spirit of our accurate and exact philosophy is outraged by conclusions that contradict each other so glaringly.”

Christopher Hitchens

Image

“Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so…

Christopher Hitchens

Image

It's [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them…

Christopher Hitchens

Image

To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.

Christopher Hitchens

Image

[Religion] attacks us in our deepest integrity - the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we…

Christopher Hitchens

Image

“In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or,…

Christopher Hitchens

Image

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

Christopher Hitchens

Image

Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug…

Christopher Hitchens

Image

There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have…

Christopher Hitchens

Image

“It isn’t so long since a test of Anglican orthodoxy was applied to anyone seeking to study or teach at Oxford and Cambridge universities.…

Christopher Hitchens

Image

Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men…

Christopher Hitchens

Image

It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't…

Christopher Hitchens

Image

Explore all 1,241 Christopher Hitchens quotes

More Good and evil quotes

“Most people believe the apple merely represented Knowledge. But we know better. It was the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and…

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Image

“The aristocratic interiority is centered on the higher mind, the mens, the ajna chakra, the seat of intellect and intuition that commands the lower…

Julius Evola

Image

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

Anonymous

Image

In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying…

Simone Weil

Image

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Image

“If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under…

Charlotte Brontë

Image

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

Tom Robbins

Image

I believe it's true that there's good and evil in everyone and it's a constant struggle to have your better angels prevail.

William Friedkin

Image

“In a fallen world, it was hard to do unambiguous good.”

Thomas Keneally

Image

“Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to every person. One that we reveal to the world and…

Emily Thorne

Image

The fall [of your soul] from perfection into duality...was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil...This is the Biblical…

Joseph Campbell