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

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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I don't think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk about what literature nourishes, it would be silly of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.
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I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.
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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.
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Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.
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Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.
Christopher Hitchens
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Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.
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Exceptional claims, require exceptional evidence.
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The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
Christopher Hitchens
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There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.
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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.
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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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A bit of a stomach give a chap a position in society.
Christopher Hitchens
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If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.
Christopher Hitchens
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If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
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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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The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
Christopher Hitchens
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The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
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Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.
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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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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