"Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect."
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Quote collection
Christopher Hitchens quotes (page 30 of 32)
626 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory"
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"Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience."
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"To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness."
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"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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"I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply."
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"When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen"
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"It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in."
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"If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."
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"Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion."
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"If you think all this is going on, all these gigantic fields of gravity and light with you in mind, then you really do have a self-centredness problem."
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"I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, 'He is not a lush.' That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, 'Look!'"
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"No moral person would do such a thing unless they thought it was divinely warranted."
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"Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know."
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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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"As I've said before, you can be an atheist and anything you like."
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"There is no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot instantly be improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’."
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"If we have free will, by definition we cannot be granted it. We can't be given it. My [-audio-recording-distorted-] paradox states that 'Of course we have free will, we have no choice.' To say that it's a gift is to negate the whole concept of free will on its face. So, if that isn't self-evident, I can't think of anything that would meet the definition of being self-evident."
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"Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact."
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