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Christopher Hitchens citations
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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

“Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence”

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Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: 2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
Contexte: Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

“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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Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“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.”

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Christopher Hitchens

“Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.”

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Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

“Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.”

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Christopher Hitchens

Source: Arguably: Selected Essays

“A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful.”

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Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

“America is actually the country to which people came in the most of a hurry, to try and find if that life could really be lived as a society. Some of them came to practice their religion freely. Many came to escape from persecution by other religions. Some came to be free from religion altogether, and that's why the Constitution is godless and doesn't mention the word, but it was not written by atheists. It was written by democratic theists and secularists, and that's why the meeting at Philadelphia, which decided these matters and decides them still for us, was a godless one, if not an atheist one. And that's why I think modern America should be a lot more anti-religious than it is. It should pay less respect, and make much less reverence toward religion, than its mass media… presently do.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2000s, 2000, "Hostility Of America to Religion" (2000)

“One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html
2000s, 2004

“A people that began to think as citizens rather than subjects might transcend underdevelopment on their own. Inalienable human right is unique in that it needs no superhuman guarantee; no 'fount' except itself. Only servility requires the realm (suggestive word) of illusion. Illusions, of course, cannot be abolished. But they can and must be outgrown.”

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Christopher Hitchens

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“It [Obama's Nobel peace prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2009-10-12
Morning Joe
MSNBC, quoted in * 2009-10-12
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/12/christopher-hitchens-pans_n_317373.html
Christopher Hitchens Pans Obama's Nobel Prize
Huffington Post
Nicholas
Graham
2000s, 2009

“If most of those who took part in this one-dimensional debate were honest with themselves, they would admit that they do not in principle believe that the United States can do any good overseas for anyone but the American government, its armed forces, or privileged American elites.”

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Christopher Hitchens

1994
December 1993/January
http://www.bostonreview.net/world/hitchens-never-trust-imperialists
Never Trust Imperialists (Especially When They Turn Pacifist)
Boston Review
1990s

“At the moment, it’s very clear to me the most toxic form that religion takes is the Islamic form… The whole idea of wanting to end up with Sharia with a religion-governed state — a state of religious law — and the best means of getting there is Jihad, Holy War, that Muslims have a special right to feel aggrieved enough to demand this is absolute obscene wickedness and I think their religion is nonsense, in its entirety.”

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Christopher Hitchens

http://www.inquisitr.com/1735647/christopher-hitchens-islam-comments-resurface-after-charlie-hebdo-its-the-most-depraved-religion/
2010s, 2010

“The next stop on Reagan's European tour after Bitburg was Madrid, where he made a speech in which he said, "I know there's been a lot of controversy about the United States and Spain at that time, indeed some Americans once came here to fight in the civil war." He said, "But the thing is," said Reagan, "they were on the wrong side." In other words a conscious choice, a conscious and deliberate remark showing that the sympathy for fascism, not accidental, not anecdotal, not a slip of the tongue, but something bred-in-the-bone; and, I think, also worth recalling.”

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Christopher Hitchens

1990s

“The progress that's made … in any argument or in any discussion is by confrontation. That's a dialectical fact. People say "oh let's have less heat and more light," fatuously. There's only one source of light. It happens to be heat.”

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Christopher Hitchens

May 4, 2008 TimesTalk http://www.nytimes.whsites.net/talk/podcasts.html.
2000s, 2008

“It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' "… In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2010s, 2011

“Many of the points made by the antiwar movement have been consciously assimilated by the Pentagon and its lawyers and advisers. Precision weaponry is good in itself, but its ability to discriminate is improving and will continue to improve. 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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Christopher Hitchens

2002-09-08
Its' a Good Time for War
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/globe_stories/090802_hitchens_2.htm: On the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
2000s, 2002

“Well if you reduce religion to social work, so does USAID produce…do all that. Actually, a secular organization, actually rather more convincingly. Most of the great philanthropist of the united states have been atheists…doesn't prove that atheism is correct.”

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Christopher Hitchens

2000s, 2007
Source: Hannity's America, May 13, 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created

“Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in crime are now in jail, or are awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited. His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the philosopher Anacharsis, who mantained that laws were like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.”

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Christopher Hitchens

[The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2002, 1859846319, 46240330, [E840.8.K58 H58 2001]]
2000s, 2002

“Hannity-"I am a believer. I believe in a creator." Hitchens-"And that's where it stops, or you think this creator cares about you too?"”

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Christopher Hitchens

Hannity's America, May 13, 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created
2000s, 2007

“In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.”

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Christopher Hitchens

I.
2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012)

“The "line of the day" among administration spokesmen, confronted by masses of destitute and terrified refugees and solid reports of the mass execution of civilians, is to say that "we expected this to happen." They did? (They never told anyone.) If they want to avoid being indicted for war crimes themselves, these "spokesmen" had better promise us that they were lying when they said that.”

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Christopher Hitchens

1990s