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The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity

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
Power
Rectitude
Must
Tedium
Never
Certainties
People
Uniformity
Ally
Allies
Certainty
Impossible
Humorless

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.
Christopher Hitchens
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We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, the transcendent or the numinous or even the ecstatic that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.
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One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.
Christopher Hitchens
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Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
Christopher Hitchens
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The best blended Scotch in the history of the world - which was also the favourite drink of the Iraqi Baath Party, as it still is of the Palestinian Authority and the Libyan dictatorship and large branches of the Saudi Arabian royal family - is Johnnie Walker Black. Breakfast of champions, accept no substitute.
Christopher Hitchens
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History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.
Christopher Hitchens
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The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.
Christopher Hitchens
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I'm dying, but so are you
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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Part of the function of memory is to forget the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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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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Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.
Christopher Hitchens
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Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.
Christopher Hitchens
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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(Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.
Christopher Hitchens
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The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: anima-the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.
Christopher Hitchens
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The atheist proposition is the following - most of the time - it may not be said that there is no god it may be said that there is no reason to think that there is one.
Christopher Hitchens