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Christopher Eric Hitchens, né le 13 avril 1949 à Portsmouth et mort le 15 décembre 2011 à Houston , est un écrivain et journaliste ayant les nationalités britannique et américaine. Ses livres, ses essais et ses articles de presse ponctuent une carrière longue de 40 années.

Diplômé en philosophie, sciences politiques et sciences économiques du Balliol College d'Oxford, cet Anglo-Américain est successivement rédacteur et critique littéraire pour des journaux prestigieux comme The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, ou The Nation. Observateur politique et polémiste, il accède à la notoriété en tant que défenseur des idées de gauche en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis. Il s'en éloigne toutefois à partir de 1989, à cause de ce qu'il considère comme des « réactions tièdes » de la gauche occidentale à l'appel au meurtre de Salman Rushdie par l'ayatollah Khomeiny. Les attentats du 11 septembre 2001 renforcent sa conviction interventionniste en matière de politique étrangère ; sa critique de ce qu'il appelle le « fascisme à visage islamique » se fait véhémente. Ses prises de positions publiques, ses conférences et ses attaques contre Mère Teresa, Hillary Clinton et Henry Kissinger font de lui un polémiste engagé célèbre auprès du public anglophone, puis sur le plan international.

Icône du mouvement athée, reconnu comme un intellectuel influent, Christopher Hitchens s'est décrit comme un antithéiste, défenseur des idées des Lumières. Il a notamment dénoncé le concept d'un dieu « entité suprême » comme une croyance totalitaire qui détruit la liberté des individus, et souhaitait que la libre expression et le progrès scientifique prennent le pas sur la religion. Son ouvrage intitulé Dieu n'est pas grand sur l'athéisme et la nature des religions a connu un immense succès lors de sa sortie en 2007. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. avril 1949 – 15. décembre 2011   •   Autres noms Christopher Eric Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens photo
Christopher Hitchens: 309   citations 3   J'aime

Christopher Hitchens citations célèbres

“La circoncision complète, originellement exigée par dieu comme prix du sang pour le futur massacre des habitants de Canaan, apparaît aujourd'hui clairement pour ce qu'elle est : la mutilation d'un bébé innocent dans le but de détruire sa vie sexuelle future. Le lien entre la barbarie religieuse et la répression sexuelle ne saurait être plus évident que lorsqu'il est « marqué dans la chair ». Qui pourra compter le nombre de vies ainsi rendues misérables, surtout depuis que des médecins chrétiens se sont mis à adopter l'antique folklore juif dans leurs hôpitaux? Et qui peut supporter de lire les manuels et les histoires de la médecine qui recensent froidement le nombre de petits garçons morts d'une infection après leur huitième jour, ou qui ont subi des dysfonctionnements et déformations intolérables? […] S'il ne s'agissait pas de religion et de son arrogance, aucune société saine d'esprit ne tolérerait cette amputation primitive, ni n'autoriserait une opération chirurgicale sur les parties génitales sans le consentement total et informé de la personne concernée.”

Christopher Hitchens

Dieu n'est pas grand : Comment la religion empoisonne tout, 2008

“La religion empoisonne tout. La religion se mêle de sexe, contrôle ce que nous mangeons et exacerbe notre propension à la culpabilité en multipliant les interdits les plus arbitraires. La religion diabolise la science, se fait complice de l'ignorance et de l'obscurantisme. Source de haine, de tyrannie et de guerres, la religion met notre monde en danger.”

Christopher Hitchens

Dieu n'est pas grand : Comment la religion empoisonne tout, 2008

“[L]a religion est une fabrication humaine. Même ceux qui l'ont élaborée ne peuvent se mettre d'accord sur ce que leurs prophètes, sauveurs ou gourous ont effectivement dit ou fait.”

Christopher Hitchens

Dieu n'est pas grand : Comment la religion empoisonne tout, 2008

“La loi pakistanaise permet de "condamner" une femme à subir un viol collectif afin d'expier la "honte" d'une crime commis par son frère.”

Christopher Hitchens

god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Christopher Hitchens: Citations en anglais

“And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.”

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Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.”

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Christopher Hitchens

“For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.”

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Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”

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Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Dembski, 18/11/2010 ( closing remarks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwgYYxfpPC0)
2010s, 2010
Contexte: When Socrates was sentenced to death, for his philosophical investigations and his blasphemy for challenging the Gods of the city and he accepted his death. He did say "well, if we're lucky perhaps I'll be able to hold a conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too", in other words that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble and what is pure and what is true can always go on. Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that is the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don't know, but I do know that it is the conversation I want to have while I am still alive. Which means that for me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet. That I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way. And I urge you to look at those of you that tell you (at your age) that that you are dead until you believe as they do. (What a terrible thing to be telling to children.) And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don't think of that as a gift, think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside no matter how tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

“What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”

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Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

“The most educated person in the world now has to admit-- I shall not say confess-- that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.”

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Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: 2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012), p. 91.

“I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.”

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Christopher Hitchens

“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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Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

“It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.”

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Christopher Hitchens livre Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.”

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Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

“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.”

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Christopher Hitchens

“Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“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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Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“It's [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren't even young and beautiful now.”

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Christopher Hitchens

“Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.”

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Christopher Hitchens

“What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.”

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Christopher Hitchens livre The Missionary Position

Source: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens vs. Barry Brummett, 04/06/2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjSMmRFHaJM&t=13m50s
2010s, 2011

“Cheap booze is a false economy.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“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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Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.”

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Christopher Hitchens

“Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.”

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Christopher Hitchens livre Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir