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Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.

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
Morality
Gets
Religion

More quotes by 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.
Christopher Hitchens
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We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we ­persist in self-­centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time.
Christopher Hitchens
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She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.
Christopher Hitchens
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What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.
Christopher Hitchens
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There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.
Christopher Hitchens
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Here’s someone who says there’s no such thing, it’s all intelligent design. How sure am I of my own views? Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you’re bound to be okay, because you’re in the safely moral majority.
Christopher Hitchens
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I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.
Christopher Hitchens
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You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.
Christopher Hitchens
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If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech.
Christopher Hitchens
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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 don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.
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.
Christopher Hitchens
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I'm very happy by myself - I'm lucky in that way - if I've got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.
Christopher Hitchens
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Exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn't so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside the baggy garments.
Christopher Hitchens
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The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
Christopher Hitchens
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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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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 only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
Christopher Hitchens
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It is a pity that...the majority of feminists and their allies have stuck to the dead ground of Me Decade possessive individualism, an ideology that has more in common than it admits with the prehistoric right, which it claims to oppose but has in fact encouraged.
Christopher Hitchens
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We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.
Christopher Hitchens