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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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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
Atheism
Dies
Doe
Better
Convert
Atheist
Believer

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.
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If you can charm everyone it means you don't care about anyone in particular.
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I vote and I do jury duty.
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In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
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A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.
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It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.
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I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated
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Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.
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You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.
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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.
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The thing about religion is that it's the first and the worst. The worst because it's the first.
Christopher Hitchens
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I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.
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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Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
Christopher Hitchens
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We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we ­persist in self-­centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time.
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.
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I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.
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Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.
Christopher Hitchens
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How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
Christopher Hitchens