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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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Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.
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I personally want to do death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.
Christopher Hitchens
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In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.
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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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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.
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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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I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.
Christopher Hitchens
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Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.
Christopher Hitchens
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What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.
Christopher Hitchens
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Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers the most plainly reactionary people in the world.
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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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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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You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.
Christopher Hitchens
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This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?
Christopher Hitchens
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I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me.
Christopher Hitchens
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In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.
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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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History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.
Christopher Hitchens
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We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.
Christopher Hitchens
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What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.
Christopher Hitchens