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

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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What they [the 9/11 attackers] abominate about 'the west', to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.
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My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.
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Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, Created sick Commanded to be well. And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.
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The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.
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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.
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Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
Christopher Hitchens
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We know that our life is essentially tragic. I'm absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, Why didn't you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind.
Christopher Hitchens
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I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
Christopher Hitchens
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I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.
Christopher Hitchens
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I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me.
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.
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If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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A celebrity is well known for being well known. I'm relatively well known - but for what I've written and said, or so I fondly imagine.
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.
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The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.
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I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.
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How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
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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The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.
Christopher Hitchens