The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSHow dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
More Christopher Hitchens Quotes
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To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
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Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.
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I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.
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How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
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I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it’s a form of love, and it deserves our respect for that reason.
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Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
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The faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.
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What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.
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Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
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Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
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I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.
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Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.
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I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language – always the language – was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.
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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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I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
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The finest fury is the most controlled.
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Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.
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Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.
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The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.
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Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.
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Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things… one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.
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One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on.
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The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
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I became a journalist because I didn’t want to have to rely on the press for information… I only read it to make sure of whatever everyone else thinks is going on, because it’s useful to know what people think is the news.
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To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS