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To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Christopher Hitchens

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Christopher Hitchens
Age: 62 †
Born: 1949
Born: April 13
Died: 2011
Died: December 15
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Political Scientist
Writer
Portsmouth
England
Christopher Eric Hitchens
Faith
Dogma
Experience
Aids
Atheist
Throw
Atheism
Kool
Reach
Greedily
Choose
Ripening
Doubt
Vintage

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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I wrote a piece from North Korea called Visit to a Small Planet which is a line I stole from a play of Gore Vidal's, because it did seem to me as if I had left this planet completely to go on this visit to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, and it was as if coming back from another spatial body altogether.
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Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.
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The noble title of dissident must be earned rather than claimed it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
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I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.
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I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.
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If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.
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Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
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A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.
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The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.
Christopher Hitchens
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To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.
Christopher Hitchens
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What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.
Christopher Hitchens
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It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.
Christopher Hitchens
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Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age.
Christopher Hitchens
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A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.
Christopher Hitchens
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With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.
Christopher Hitchens
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[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.
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I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.
Christopher Hitchens
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Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.
Christopher Hitchens