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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
Essence
Lies
Opinion
Lying
Purpose
Mind
Skepticism
Thinking
Thinks
Independent

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask for a doggie bag.
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Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.
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Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts.
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Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?
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Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.
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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.
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I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion fosters servility and solipsism.
Christopher Hitchens
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There is no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot instantly be improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’.
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.
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I'm a single-issue voter, to get straight to the point. I'm really only interested in the candidate who's toughest and least apologetic when it comes to the confrontation with Islamic Jihadism.
Christopher Hitchens
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If you say the economy, you show you're stupid. There's no such thing as the economy. There is not a unity between the forces of production and the relations of production.
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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The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.
Christopher Hitchens
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For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
Christopher Hitchens
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The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
Christopher Hitchens
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Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
Christopher Hitchens
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As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only.
Christopher Hitchens
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Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.
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There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.
Christopher Hitchens