"For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time."
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Christopher Hitchens quotes (page 18 of 32)
626 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I can never quite decide whether the anti-Columbus movement is merely risible or faintly sinister. It is sinister, though, because it is an ignorant celebration of stasis and backwardness, with an unpleasant tinge of self-hatred."
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"The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both."
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"The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes."
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"The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient."
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"There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar."
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"Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all."
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"I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised."
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"Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that - or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation - is worth it to me. [It is] impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle."
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"A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative."
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"At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied."
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"it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists"
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"'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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"There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn't be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb."
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"We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes."
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"My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it."
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"I am a person of faith: I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all."
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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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"I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap."
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"In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable."
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