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Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

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
Human
Beginnings
Humans
Essential
Things
Essentials
Laugh
Authority
Laughing
Ability
Mockery
Religion
Emancipation

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.
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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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The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example.
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The thing about religion is that it's the first and the worst. The worst because it's the first.
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If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn.
Christopher Hitchens
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Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.
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Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
Christopher Hitchens
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The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.
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We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.
Christopher Hitchens
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Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.
Christopher Hitchens
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I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.
Christopher Hitchens
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We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, the transcendent or the numinous or even the ecstatic that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort.
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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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.
Christopher Hitchens
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[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
Christopher Hitchens
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I have a strong constitution which has served me quite well, though if I hadn't had such a strong one I might have led a more healthy life perhaps.
Christopher Hitchens
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My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
Christopher Hitchens
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I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.
Christopher Hitchens
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No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
Christopher Hitchens