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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

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For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
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Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.
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The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.
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Cheap booze is a false economy.
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It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.
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I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.
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So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion.
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Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.
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In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
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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.
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And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.
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Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
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Take the risk of thinking for yourself
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Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.
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Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
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Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.
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It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.
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The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.
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Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled.
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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.
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