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I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, 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
Doe
Lincoln
Wells
Apply
Well
Torture
Nothing
Test
Thing
Tests
Slavery
Moral
Constitute
Wrong
Abraham

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I'm dying, but so are you
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It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque.
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If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.
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I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?
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Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.... Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.
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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.
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This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.
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How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
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The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.
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I'd like to prove to other people that it's not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer.
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I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.
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I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.
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Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self a celestial North Korea.
Christopher Hitchens
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If people I've never met or don't know say that what I've written or done or said means anything to them, then I'm happy to take it at face value, for once. It cheers me up.
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The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.
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Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
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The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
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I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.
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You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.
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Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.
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