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The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

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
Independent
Essence
Lies
Opinion
Lying
Purpose
Mind
Skepticism
Thinking
Thinks

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.
Christopher Hitchens
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Here’s someone who says there’s no such thing, it’s all intelligent design. How sure am I of my own views? Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you’re bound to be okay, because you’re in the safely moral majority.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.
Christopher Hitchens
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I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.
Christopher Hitchens
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Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
Christopher Hitchens
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And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.
Christopher Hitchens
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We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, the transcendent or the numinous or even the ecstatic that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort.
Christopher Hitchens
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I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.
Christopher Hitchens
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Cheap booze is a false economy.
Christopher Hitchens
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The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.
Christopher Hitchens
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Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.
Christopher Hitchens
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Exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn't so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside the baggy garments.
Christopher Hitchens
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In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.
Christopher Hitchens
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Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.
Christopher Hitchens
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What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.
Christopher Hitchens