CHChristopher Hitchens

337 collected words

Christopher Hitchens

Life dates: 1949 AD — 2011 AD

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01c. 1980 AD

How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

Christopher Hitchens / quote

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02c. 1980 AD

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

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03c. 1980 AD

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

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04c. 1980 AD

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.

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05c. 1980 AD

I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.

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06c. 1980 AD

I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

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07c. 1980 AD

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

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08c. 1980 AD

'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

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09c. 1980 AD

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

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10c. 1980 AD

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

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11c. 1980 AD

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

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12c. 1980 AD

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.

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13c. 1980 AD

I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.

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14c. 1980 AD

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

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15c. 1980 AD

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

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16c. 1980 AD

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

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17c. 1980 AD

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.

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18c. 1980 AD

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

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19c. 1980 AD

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

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20c. 1980 AD

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

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21c. 1980 AD

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

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22c. 1980 AD

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.

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23c. 1980 AD

I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

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24c. 1980 AD

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

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