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Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.

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
Believe
Things
People
Wacky
Affirm
Intelligent
Crazy
Religion
Makes

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The prostitute journalist is a familiar and well-understood figure in the Middle East, and Saddam Hussein's regime made lavish use of the buyability of the regional press. Now we, too, have hired that clapped-out old floozy, Miss Rosie Scenario, and sent her whoring through the streets.
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History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.
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I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.
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My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it against any consensus, any majority anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.
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The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
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I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.
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I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.
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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.
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Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.
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Take the risk of thinking for yourself
Christopher Hitchens
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Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
Christopher Hitchens
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The thing about religion is that it's the first and the worst. The worst because it's the first.
Christopher Hitchens
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What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.
Christopher Hitchens
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Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.
Christopher Hitchens
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The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.
Christopher Hitchens
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You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.
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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Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.
Christopher Hitchens
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Haven't we all heard some irritating person saying that if so-and-so is elected, then he/she is absolutely definitely leaving the country? There must be some reason why it is mainly liberals who tend to say this, but the chief thing to note about the promise is that it is usually an empty one.
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Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.... Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.
Christopher Hitchens