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Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.

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
Ideals
Harbors
Ought
Previous
Existence
Authors
Guide
Friendly
Pull
Foundering
Guides
Peaceable
Ideal
Harbor

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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The atheist proposition is the following - most of the time - it may not be said that there is no god it may be said that there is no reason to think that there is one.
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I don't think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk about what literature nourishes, it would be silly of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.
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In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask for a doggie bag.
Christopher Hitchens
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What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.
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Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.
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It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.
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To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.
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Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.
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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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Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.
Christopher Hitchens
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Shepherds don't look after sheep because they love them - although I do think some shepherds like their sheep too much. They look after their sheep so they can, first, fleece them and second, turn them into meat. That's much more like the priesthood as I know it.
Christopher Hitchens
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As I've said before, you can be an atheist and anything you like.
Christopher Hitchens
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Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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Part of the function of memory is to forget the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.
Christopher Hitchens
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I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people.
Christopher Hitchens
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Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age.
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People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
Christopher Hitchens