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If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

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
Constitute
Torture
Doe
Thing

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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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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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.
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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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My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
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One of the reasons I decided to apply for American citizenship after something like a quarter of century of living here on a British, European Union passport and a green card, was my identification with the United States in the post-September 11th period.
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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Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.
Christopher Hitchens
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Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
Christopher Hitchens
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To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.
Christopher Hitchens
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I personally want to do death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.
Christopher Hitchens
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My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.
Christopher Hitchens
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No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
Christopher Hitchens
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There is no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot instantly be improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’.
Christopher Hitchens
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My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.
Christopher Hitchens
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The faithful believe that certain truths have been 'revealed.' The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.
Christopher Hitchens
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Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled.
Christopher Hitchens
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As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.
Christopher Hitchens
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The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.
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 one unforgivable sin is to be boring.
Christopher Hitchens