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The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for peace through strength has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog.

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
Effect
Covert
Tough
Preparedness
Effects
Legislative
Strength
Branch
Lapdog
Peace
Pornography
Watchdog
Action
Legal
Predictably
Branches
Hypnotic
Turning
Mindedness

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.
Christopher Hitchens
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To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
Christopher Hitchens
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With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.
Christopher Hitchens
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There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.
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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I wrote a piece from North Korea called Visit to a Small Planet which is a line I stole from a play of Gore Vidal's, because it did seem to me as if I had left this planet completely to go on this visit to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, and it was as if coming back from another spatial body altogether.
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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The stupider the regime the more intelligent the people get and the more humorous.
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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No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.
Christopher Hitchens
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The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
Christopher Hitchens
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A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.
Christopher Hitchens
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If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn.
Christopher Hitchens
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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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The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
Christopher Hitchens
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It's called faith because it's not knowledge.
Christopher Hitchens
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In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people's possessions or fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have positive consequences.
Christopher Hitchens
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It [Obama's Nobel peace prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.
Christopher Hitchens
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Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
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