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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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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
Piety
Election
Office
Times
Running
Part
Repellent
People
Spectacles
Pretense

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Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
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If you can charm everyone it means you don't care about anyone in particular.
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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.
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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.
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What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.
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I was taught very early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer.
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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.
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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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If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
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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.
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I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me.
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The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.
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As I've said before, you can be an atheist and anything you like.
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Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.
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Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth
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We have millions and millions of North Korean children totally stunted in mind and body and will have to be dealt with at some point, who have been raised to believe that they live in a regime that is run by a god.
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I'm a single-issue voter, to get straight to the point. I'm really only interested in the candidate who's toughest and least apologetic when it comes to the confrontation with Islamic Jihadism.
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Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.
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I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.
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I'm a member of no party. I have no ideology. I'm a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that's all around us.
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