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What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.


Christopher Hitchens

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Or to re...
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“How can I partic...
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CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, fo...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS It is certain, that, in every religion, however sublime the verbal definition which it gives of its ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Believing then … that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one’s natural pessimis...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to “encourage a hope that the human mind will s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS How sad to be a woman—not to know Aught of the glory of this breast of snow, All unconcerned to co...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of g...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other word...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS To be charitable, one may admit that the religious often seem unaware of how insulting their main pr...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of g...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death i...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the r...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the sp...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or un...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and re...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything i...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John B...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had n...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, bu...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the childre...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless s...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The onl...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to th...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really no...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adher...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Naz...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of ...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But th...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to th...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS