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Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

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
Men
Civilised
Posing
Intellectuals
Foolish
Lasts
Last
Sound
Never

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You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
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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.
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The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
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MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.
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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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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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What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.
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I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.
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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?
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People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.
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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?
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Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
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I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.
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One of the many problems with the American left has been its image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.
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My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.
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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.
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My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.
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When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul.
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One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.
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Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.
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