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I say 'Merry Christmas' to people I don't know, or to people I know are Christians. I say 'Happy Hanukkah' to people I know to be or suspect to be Jewish. And I don't say 'Happy Kwanzaa,' because I think African Americans get enough insults all year round.

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
Enough
Christians
Hanukkah
Years
Round
Insults
Think
Rounds
Merry
Thinking
Christmas
Suspect
People
Americans
Suspects
Year
Insult
Happy
Jewish
Christian
African

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
Christopher Hitchens
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Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.
Christopher Hitchens
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I'd like to prove to other people that it's not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer.
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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The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.
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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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If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.
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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To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
Christopher Hitchens
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The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
Christopher Hitchens
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There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.
Christopher Hitchens
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All this could be part of a plan. There is no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn't it? With mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time. And all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination, in order that the pope can tell people not to jerk off.
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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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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For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.
Christopher Hitchens
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Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.
Christopher Hitchens
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I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.
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 gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
Christopher Hitchens
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Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.
Christopher Hitchens