Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
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Hitchens: 'Let me ask a question to Mr Heston: can he tell me, clockwise, what countries have frontiers and borders with Iraq, starting from Kuwait?'
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Religion is innately irrational.
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I ask myself why do these worshipers of this God want to convict him of being such a crummy designer - most of his creations die off, the rest suffer miserably; of being cruel and capricious and bungling and incompetent and callous as a father? www.youtube.com/watch?v=THHapkLeSGo?t=24m23s
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If most of those who took part in this one-dimensional debate were honest with themselves, they would admit that they do not in principle believe that the United States can do any good overseas for anyone but the American government, its armed forces, or privileged American elites.
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Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.
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It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one. - 'Reactionary Prophet', The Atlantic, April 2004
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(Howard) Dean is a raving nut bag...a raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.
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Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
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Well if you reduce religion to social work, so does USAID produce...do all that. Actually, a secular organization, actually rather more convincingly. Most of the great philanthropist of the united states have been atheists...doesn't prove that atheism is correct.
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That most risky and volatile of all things—a self-pitying majority.
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A people that began to think as citizens rather than subjects might transcend underdevelopment on their own. Inalienable human right is unique in that it needs no superhuman guarantee; no 'fount' except itself. Only servility requires the realm (suggestive word) of illusion. Illusions, of course, cannot be abolished. But they can and must be outgrown.
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The (Catholic) church, as far as I know, has not endorsed any war as just since it supported General Franco's invasion of Spain to destroy the Spanish republic with a Muslim mercenary army in the thirties, on the side of Hitler.
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I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
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You give me the awful impression, I hate to have say it, of someone who hasn't read any of the arguments against your position ever.
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The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.
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Those who say that without the monarchy Britain would be a banana republic are closing their eyes to the banana republic features which the cult of monarchy necessitates. Dazzled by the show, moreover, they may be missing other long-run tendencies towards banana-dom which it is the partial function of monarchy to obscure.
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They want me to immolate myself, and I sincerely believe that for some of them, when they see bad news from Iraq, the reaction is simply 'This will make Hitchens look bad!' I've been trying to avoid solipsism, but I've come to believe there are such people.
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My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.
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I’m quite convinced in my own mind that those who were arguing that the need to intervene in Iraq was a more immediate one than some believed - were I’m sure convinced that they were right on fact, I don’t think they were making it up. So as to lying, I don’t think it has been established that any lies were told.
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Is there anything that is forbidden to anybody who says they have God on their side? Who says they have God with them? Is there any evil that they forbid themselves to do? 10
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The transformation of part of the northern part of this continent into 'America' inaugurated a nearly boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation, and thus deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto, with or without the participation of those who wish they had never been born.
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As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be 'me.' (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)
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No possible future government in Kabul can be worse than the Taliban, and no thinkable future government would allow the level of Al Qaeda gangsterism to recur. So the outcome is proportionate and congruent with international principles of self-defense.