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I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.
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
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Portsmouth
England
Christopher Eric Hitchens
Felt
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More quotes by Christopher Hitchens
If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech.
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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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Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.
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Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
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The stupider the regime the more intelligent the people get and the more humorous.
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And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.
Christopher Hitchens
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 all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste.
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At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.
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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.
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I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.
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I personally want to do death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.
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What they [the 9/11 attackers] abominate about 'the west', to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.
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Religion fosters servility and solipsism.
Christopher Hitchens
Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.
Christopher Hitchens
I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.
Christopher Hitchens
My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.
Christopher Hitchens
The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.
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Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.
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Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.
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Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!
Christopher Hitchens