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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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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
Religion
Firsts
First
Thing
Worst

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God's on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.
Christopher Hitchens
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What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.
Christopher Hitchens
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The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.
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.
Christopher Hitchens
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The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example.
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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I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me.
Christopher Hitchens
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My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.
Christopher Hitchens
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My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
Christopher Hitchens
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The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both.
Christopher Hitchens
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The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.
Christopher Hitchens
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People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
Christopher Hitchens
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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?
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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One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.
Christopher Hitchens
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Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.
Christopher Hitchens
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Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.
Christopher Hitchens
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Happiness is fleeting and life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us.
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