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Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

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
Longer
Telescope
Religion
Microscope
Anything
Microscopes
Important
Telescopes
Explanation
Thanks
Atheism
Offers

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
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She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.
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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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In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
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Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.
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A rule of thumb with humor if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.
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Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
Christopher Hitchens
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An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.
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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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The obsession with gold, actually and politically, occurs among those who regard economics as a branch of morality. Gold is solid, gold is durable, gold is rare, gold is even (in certain very peculiar circumstances) convertible. To believe in thrift, solidity and soundness is to believe in some way in the properties of gold.
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I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it's a form of love, and it deserves our respect for that reason.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.
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I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.
Christopher Hitchens
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What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.
Christopher Hitchens
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Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.
Christopher Hitchens
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I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.
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I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
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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Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
Christopher Hitchens