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Take the risk of thinking for yourself

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
Thinking
Risk
Take

More quotes by Christopher Hitchens

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There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.
Christopher Hitchens
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There is no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot instantly be improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’.
Christopher Hitchens
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Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.
Christopher Hitchens
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Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.
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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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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All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.
Christopher Hitchens
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If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Christopher Hitchens
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The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.
Christopher Hitchens
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High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
Christopher Hitchens
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With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.
Christopher Hitchens
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The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.
Christopher Hitchens
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In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.
Christopher Hitchens
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Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.
Christopher Hitchens
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Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing
Christopher Hitchens
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How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
Christopher Hitchens
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Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.
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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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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Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
Christopher Hitchens