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We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.

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
Wells
Preacher
Savants
Well
Tolerate
Preachers
Children
Physical
Observer
Childhood
Endlessly
System
Sanctity
Child
Observers
Family
Casual
Dilate
Social
Origin
Correlate

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.
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Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.
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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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A sure sign of ineptitude and malice is manifested when one's attacker is willing to cover himself with mud in order to try and make some of it adhere to his target.
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It was not for the sake of oil that the risky decision to cease this corrupt coexistence was made. But at least now the Iraqi people have a chance of controlling their own main resource, and it will be our task to ensure that the funding and revenue are transparent instead of opaque.
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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 was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.
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The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.
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Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers the most plainly reactionary people in the world.
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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.
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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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It's called faith because it's not knowledge.
Christopher Hitchens
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Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.
Christopher Hitchens
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As I've said before, you can be an atheist and anything you like.
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All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.
Christopher Hitchens
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Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, Created sick Commanded to be well. And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.
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Unlike other countries, it was founded on written proclamations. America is an ideal as well as a republic. Its documents are open to revisions. They're works in progress. There's an invitation to participate.
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I vote and I do jury duty.
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