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What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.

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
Hurt
Radicals
Culture
Fetish
Country
Reactionaries
Make
Pose
Liberals
Radical
Brave
Nonconformists
Cry
Irrelevance

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One of the reasons I decided to apply for American citizenship after something like a quarter of century of living here on a British, European Union passport and a green card, was my identification with the United States in the post-September 11th period.
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Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power.
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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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There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.
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The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.
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Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
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At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.
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Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.
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There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.
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Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.
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You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.
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People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
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Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.
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Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.
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I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.
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This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?
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You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.
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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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Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
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Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.
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