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Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

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
Truth
Texas
Come
Statements
Take
Debate
Much
Risk
Way
Wisdom
Thinking
Beauty
Baptists
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November
Happiness
Closing

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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So there's nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn't really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it's the most nauseating spectacle.
Christopher Hitchens
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Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.
Christopher Hitchens
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With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.
Christopher Hitchens
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I wrote a piece from North Korea called Visit to a Small Planet which is a line I stole from a play of Gore Vidal's, because it did seem to me as if I had left this planet completely to go on this visit to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, and it was as if coming back from another spatial body altogether.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!
Christopher Hitchens
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The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled.
Christopher Hitchens
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The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.
Christopher Hitchens
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Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.
Christopher Hitchens
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If you think all this is going on, all these gigantic fields of gravity and light with you in mind, then you really do have a self-centredness problem.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.... Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.
Christopher Hitchens
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It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
Christopher Hitchens
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Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made.
Christopher Hitchens
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Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.
Christopher Hitchens
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She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.
Christopher Hitchens
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The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: anima-the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.
Christopher Hitchens