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

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
Christopher Hitchens
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I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.
Christopher Hitchens
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Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that - or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation - is worth it to me. [It is] impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.
Christopher Hitchens
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Christopher Hitchens
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Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.
Christopher Hitchens
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Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste.
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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I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.
Christopher Hitchens
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The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.
Christopher Hitchens
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Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?
Christopher Hitchens
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If you say the economy, you show you're stupid. There's no such thing as the economy. There is not a unity between the forces of production and the relations of production.
Christopher Hitchens
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Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled.
Christopher Hitchens
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Hero­ism breaks its heart, and ide­al­ism its back, on the intran­si­gence of the cred­u­lous and the mediocre, manip­u­lated by the cyn­i­cal and the corrupt.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion fosters servility and solipsism.
Christopher Hitchens
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I personally want to do death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.
Christopher Hitchens
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The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.
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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Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts.
Christopher Hitchens
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I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?
Christopher Hitchens
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And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.
Christopher Hitchens