Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
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I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.
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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
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The finest fury is the most controlled.
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I think the cultural task is to separate our impulses and needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.
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He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.
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The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for "peace through strength" has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog.
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Only the force of American arms, or the extremely credible threat of that force, can bring a fresh face to power.
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A good liar must have a good memory.
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The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.
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If I was told to sacrifice something to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said 'Yes I'll gut my kid to show my love of God.'
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There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.
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Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.
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We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we persist in self-centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time.
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My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.
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The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.
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I can't find the compulsory mutilation of the genitals of children a subject for humor... It's designed to repress sexual pleasure... The full excision, not just the snip but the full mandatory covenant is fantastically painful, leads to trauma, leads to the dulling of the sexual relationship. And can be, in itself life-threatening at that moment. We have records, I can show them to you, of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds in the United States of boy babies who died or had life-threatening infections as a result of this disgusting practice.
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The moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage.
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I think the materialist conception of history is valid.
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Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.
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Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.
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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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In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.
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Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste.
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There are two clocks ticking in Iran. One is the democracy movement clock which is ticking now faster than it was but it's got a lot of catching up to do. And then there's the clock that's ticking towards a nuclear weaponry.
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The teachings of Christianity - from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary - these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves.
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Friends call me Hitch. Maybe it can be turned into a 900-phone number. People would pay to talk to me.
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I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.
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The crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state.
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There are many, many discrepant views within the Shia theology about what's the proper role of religion in society or in the State, should it rule now, should it claim to govern people in the here and now, or should it wait until the Messiah, the 12th Imam, comes back and would it only be then appropriate for religious rule to bring about a world of universal justice and vindication.
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