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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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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
Lives
Iran
Women
Ideal
Foulness
Real
Model
Theocracy
Life
Ideals
Heroines
Iraq
Defy
Models
Favourite
Risk
Feminine
Beauty
Afghanistan

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.
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In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.
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The noble title of dissident must be earned rather than claimed it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
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When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul.
Christopher Hitchens
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I'm quite convinced in my own mind that those who were arguing that [the need to intervene in Iraq] was a more immediate one than some believed - were I'm sure convinced that they were right on fact, I don't think they were making it up. So as to lying, I don't think it has been established that any lies were told.
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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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Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing
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I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.
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I say 'Merry Christmas' to people I don't know, or to people I know are Christians. I say 'Happy Hanukkah' to people I know to be or suspect to be Jewish. And I don't say 'Happy Kwanzaa,' because I think African Americans get enough insults all year round.
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I've been writing a lot about a new form of Russian imperialism. Actually, Russian Orthodox imperialism. It's very little remarked that the cement, the political, ideological cement of the Russian regime now, communism having collapsed and imploded, is increasingly a confessional one.
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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Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.
Christopher Hitchens
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Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth
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A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.
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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Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
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I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
Christopher Hitchens
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If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.
Christopher Hitchens