“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species." by Christopher Hitchens?

Christopher Hitchens 305

British American author and journalist 1949–2011

Related quotes

“I speak "with absolute certainty" only so far as my own personal belief is concerned. Those who have not the same warrant for their belief as I have, would be very credulous and foolish to accept it on blind faith. Nor does the writer believe any more than her correspondent and his friends in any "authority" let alone "divine revelation!"”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) occult writer

Collected Writings, vol. XI, p. 466 (October, 1889) http://www.katinkahesselink.net/blavatsky/articles/v11/y1889_065.htm

“There is a relation belonging to this species of property, unlike that of the apprentice or the hired man, which awakens whatever there is of kindness or of nobility of soul in the heart of him who owns it; this can only be alienated, obscured, or destroyed, by collecting this species of property into such masses that the owner is not personally acquainted with the individuals who compose it.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Senate speech, 1860.
1860s

“In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

“The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it…”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belong to acquiescence and hence to weakness.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

II. Progress and Entropy. p. 47
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

“Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Do What You Will (1929)

“A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failures certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

“If we admit the existence of the prophetic mission, by putting the idea of possibility, which is in fact ignorance, in place of certainty, and make miracles a proof of the truth of man who claims to be a prophet it becomes necessary that they should not be used by a person, who says that they can be performed by others than prophets, as the Mutakallimun do.”

Averroes book On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

Part 2: The Advent of the Prophets; Opening sentence
On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

“Should a person lay claim to a cause and produce his proofs, then those who seek to repudiate him are required to produce proofs like unto his.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVII, 11
The Kitáb-I-Asmá
Context: Should a person lay claim to a cause and produce his proofs, then those who seek to repudiate him are required to produce proofs like unto his. If they succeed in doing so, his words will prove vain and they will prevail; otherwise neither his words will cease nor the proofs he hath set forth will become void. I admonish you, O ye who are invested with the Bayán, if ye would fain assert your ascendancy, confront not any soul unless ye give proofs similar to that which he hath adduced; for Truth shall be firmly established, while aught else besides it is sure to perish.

“A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie We Should All Be Feminists

Source: We Should All Be Feminists

“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Christopher Hitchens 305

Related quotes

Related topics