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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.

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
Giving
Evidence
Believe
Respect
Things
Asks
Religion
Faculty
Faith
Poison
Give
Calls
Reason
Precious
Without
Atheism

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, Created sick Commanded to be well. And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.
Christopher Hitchens
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People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.
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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The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.
Christopher Hitchens
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The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.
Christopher Hitchens
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The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.
Christopher Hitchens
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(Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.
Christopher Hitchens
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All this could be part of a plan. There is no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn't it? With mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time. And all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination, in order that the pope can tell people not to jerk off.
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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The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
Christopher Hitchens
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I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.
Christopher Hitchens
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The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
Christopher Hitchens
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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
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Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.
Christopher Hitchens
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Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that - or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation - is worth it to me. [It is] impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.
Christopher Hitchens
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Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.
Christopher Hitchens
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I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.
Christopher Hitchens
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To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.
Christopher Hitchens