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Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

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
Faith
Followed
Time
Atheist
Patience
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More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.
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I'm dying, but so are you
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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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Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I'm talking to people. It doesn't always work, and one shouldn't always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.
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The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.
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I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.
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I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.
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Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
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Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made.
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I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people.
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The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
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To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.
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What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.
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Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
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A bit of a stomach give a chap a position in society.
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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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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.
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MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.
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I can never quite decide whether the anti-Columbus movement is merely risible or faintly sinister. It is sinister, though, because it is an ignorant celebration of stasis and backwardness, with an unpleasant tinge of self-hatred.
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Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.
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