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The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

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
Capricious
Iron
Tyranny
Essence
Law

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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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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I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me.
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[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
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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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If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
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We have millions and millions of North Korean children totally stunted in mind and body and will have to be dealt with at some point, who have been raised to believe that they live in a regime that is run by a god.
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Religion fosters servility and solipsism.
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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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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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With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.
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Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God's on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.
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And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.
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I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, 'He is not a lush.' That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, 'Look!'
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Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self a celestial North Korea.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge.
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The stupider the regime the more intelligent the people get and the more humorous.
Christopher Hitchens
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Shepherds don't look after sheep because they love them - although I do think some shepherds like their sheep too much. They look after their sheep so they can, first, fleece them and second, turn them into meat. That's much more like the priesthood as I know it.
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Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
Christopher Hitchens