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Unlike other countries, it was founded on written proclamations. America is an ideal as well as a republic. Its documents are open to revisions. They're works in progress. There's an invitation to participate.

Christopher Hitchens

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Christopher Hitchens
Age: 62 †
Born: 1949
Born: April 13
Died: 2011
Died: December 15
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Portsmouth
England
Christopher Eric Hitchens
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More quotes by 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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We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, the transcendent or the numinous or even the ecstatic that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort.
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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I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people.
Christopher Hitchens
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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.
Christopher Hitchens
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High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
Christopher Hitchens
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I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge.
Christopher Hitchens
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If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
Christopher Hitchens
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A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.
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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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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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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Those who had alleged that a million civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam!
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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We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.
Christopher Hitchens
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What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.
Christopher Hitchens
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The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.
Christopher Hitchens
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It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.
Christopher Hitchens
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If you think all this is going on, all these gigantic fields of gravity and light with you in mind, then you really do have a self-centredness problem.
Christopher Hitchens
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I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.
Christopher Hitchens