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You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.

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
Unless

More quotes by 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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There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.
Christopher Hitchens
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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
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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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Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.
Christopher Hitchens
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Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.
Christopher Hitchens
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Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.
Christopher Hitchens
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I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.
Christopher Hitchens
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Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self a celestial North Korea.
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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The obsession with gold, actually and politically, occurs among those who regard economics as a branch of morality. Gold is solid, gold is durable, gold is rare, gold is even (in certain very peculiar circumstances) convertible. To believe in thrift, solidity and soundness is to believe in some way in the properties of gold.
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
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Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.
Christopher Hitchens
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I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Christopher Hitchens
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Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.
Christopher Hitchens
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It is a pity that...the majority of feminists and their allies have stuck to the dead ground of Me Decade possessive individualism, an ideology that has more in common than it admits with the prehistoric right, which it claims to oppose but has in fact encouraged.
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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This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?
Christopher Hitchens