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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
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Atheist
Patience
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More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.'
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I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.
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I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.
Christopher Hitchens
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When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all it just feels like submitting.
Christopher Hitchens
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Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?
Christopher Hitchens
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Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that - or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation - is worth it to me. [It is] impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.
Christopher Hitchens
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Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.
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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One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.
Christopher Hitchens
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History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.
Christopher Hitchens
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Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age.
Christopher Hitchens
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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
Christopher Hitchens
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If you can charm everyone it means you don't care about anyone in particular.
Christopher Hitchens
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The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
Christopher Hitchens
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In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
Christopher Hitchens
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The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
Christopher Hitchens
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The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.
Christopher Hitchens