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The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

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
Claims
Religion
Earth
Representative
Way
Easiest
Dictatorship
Representatives
Establish
Claim

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I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.
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Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self a celestial North Korea.
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Doubt, skepticism, innovation, and inquiry are the only means by which wonder, beauty, awe, and symmetry will be discovered.
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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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In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.
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I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.
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Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.
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What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.
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So there's nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn't really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it's the most nauseating spectacle.
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Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.
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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.
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[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
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Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God's on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.
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A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.
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Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
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I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
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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!'
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The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable to let some air into the discussion.
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It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.
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Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!
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