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The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

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
Political
Elegant
States
Simplest
Secular
Paradox
Guarantees
Truths
Pluralism
Religious
Apparent
State
Guarantee

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What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
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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.
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I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.
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Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.
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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.
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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.
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One can't live without fear, it's a question of what is your attitude towards fear? I'm afraid of a sordid death. I'm afraid that I will die in an ugly or squalid way, and cancer can be very vigorous in that respect.
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I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
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I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.
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It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.
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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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Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
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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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Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.
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Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.
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I would say that if you don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you're really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.
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It's called faith because it's not knowledge.
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Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.
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I'm dying, but so are you
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There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.
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