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"The believer claims to know, not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity."
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"Brand-new truths are probably not Truths."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I don't like psychiatrists, Alecto told her. "Not because they don't think I'm real, but because they have no idea what they're doing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The wrong approaches to faith and to skepticism are equally detrimental to the path. For the former declares its answers too soon and is later found false, the latter rejects sound answers altogether and hashes itself useless."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Science is not a democracy. Therefore to try to pass of global warming as real just because "98% of scientists say they agree" makes no sense at all. If 98% of psychiatrists said that all mentally ill people needed lobotomized, does that make it true? If 98% of your friends jumped off a building, would you jump, too?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Never trust a high altitude astronomer."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There is no UFO and also there is no alien, at least not in common mind nor reference."
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Personal Development
"There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that's still beyond logic of the observer."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is."
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Personal Development
"People need to stop accepting the evidence of reality, and start questioning it."
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Personal Development
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"Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope-and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing-that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so."
Writing
"Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries."
Reflection
"One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either."
Integrity
"The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies."
Philosophy
"My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them."
Faith
"The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them."
Politics
"Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence."
Mind
"In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust."
Philosophy
"There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it."
Truth
"The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book."
Philosophy
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