“To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?”
More from Christopher Hitchens on Philosophy
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
“Don’t swallow your moral code in tablet form.”
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
“[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.”
“Thus in order to be a "radical" one must be open to the possibility that one's own core assumptions are misconceived.”
“To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.”
“The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.”
“The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.”
“There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.”
“The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“Nothing endures but change.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds...”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Circumstances-what are circumstances? I make circumstances.”
Paul Valéry
13 quotes“The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.”
Charlotte Brontë
13 quotes“Beauty is given to dolls, majesty to haughty vixens, but mind, feeling, passion and the crowning grace of fortitude are...”