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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
Purpose
Mind
Skepticism
Thinking
Thinks
Independent
Essence
Lies
Opinion
Lying

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.
Christopher Hitchens
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One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.
Christopher Hitchens
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I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.
Christopher Hitchens
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So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion.
Christopher Hitchens
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Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing
Christopher Hitchens
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I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.
Christopher Hitchens
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Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.
Christopher Hitchens
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All this could be part of a plan. There is no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn't it? With mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time. And all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination, in order that the pope can tell people not to jerk off.
Christopher Hitchens
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The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.
Christopher Hitchens
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A sure sign of ineptitude and malice is manifested when one's attacker is willing to cover himself with mud in order to try and make some of it adhere to his target.
Christopher Hitchens
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Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
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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The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.
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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The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
Christopher Hitchens