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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

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
Certainty
Claims
Humility
Species
Divine
Warrant
Certain
Warrants
Persons
Infancy
Person
Belongs

More quotes by 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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At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.
Christopher Hitchens
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MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.
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Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.
Christopher Hitchens
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History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.
Christopher Hitchens
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Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts.
Christopher Hitchens
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I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.
Christopher Hitchens
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Here’s someone who says there’s no such thing, it’s all intelligent design. How sure am I of my own views? Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you’re bound to be okay, because you’re in the safely moral majority.
Christopher Hitchens
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It's normally agreed that the question 'How are you?' doesn't put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer.
Christopher Hitchens
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I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.
Christopher Hitchens
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I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge.
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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The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.
Christopher Hitchens
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Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.
Christopher Hitchens
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I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, 'He is not a lush.' That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, 'Look!'
Christopher Hitchens
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The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.
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 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
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I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
Christopher Hitchens
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Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
Christopher Hitchens