"And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair."
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Quote collection
Christopher Hitchens quotes (page 14 of 32)
626 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"So here we have found a means of a) alienating even the most flexible and patient Palestinians; while b) frustrating the efforts of the more principled and compromising Israelis; while c) empowering and financing some of the creepiest forces in American and Israeli society; and d) heaping ordure on our own secular founding documents. When will the Justice Department and the Congress and the Supreme Court become aware of this huge and rank offense, which is designed to bring us ever nearer to holy war?"
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"One can't indefinitely do for somebody what he is reluctant to do for himself."
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"Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things."
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"I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect."
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"In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test."
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"I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation."
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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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"The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it."
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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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"I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s."
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"I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information."
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"Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one."
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"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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"There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state."
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"I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me."
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"I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise."
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"Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction."
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"Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't."
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"I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me."
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