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Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers the most plainly reactionary people in the world.

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
Today
Murderers
World
Reactionaries
People
Plainly
Murderer
Islamist
Applied
Stupidly
Radical
Puke
Hear
Islamists
Word
Reactionary

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Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self a celestial North Korea.
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In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask for a doggie bag.
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You can't have occupation and human rights.
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There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.
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Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
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Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
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Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.
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Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.
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I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.
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I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, 'He is not a lush.' That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, 'Look!'
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An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.
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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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Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.
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In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
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This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.
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