Life & Wisdom Quote by Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens is prying apart a comforting fairy tale: that the people who do moral good must themselves be morally good. It’s a line aimed less at saints than at the audience that keeps demanding them. In his typically unsentimental way, he’s warning that our hunger for purity can become a veto on progress. If we insist that only spotless messengers may deliver justice, we hand power to hypocrisy and guarantee disappointment.

The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s a defense of messy coalitions and compromised heroes: the alcoholic who still tells the truth, the adulterer who still fights tyranny, the egotist who still builds a humane institution. On the other, it’s a rebuke to moral exhibitionism. “Character” becomes, in Hitchens’s subtext, a kind of credentialism - a way of policing who gets to speak, who gets to lead, and which causes are allowed to be taken seriously. The phrase “precondition” is doing heavy lifting: it implies a gate slammed shut by those who would rather audit a biography than confront an atrocity.

Context matters: Hitchens wrote and argued through decades obsessed with personal scandal, public virtue-signaling, and the post-Watergate expectation that politics should double as spiritual instruction. He also lived the contradiction personally - a man with visible vices who nevertheless made a career out of moral argument. The wit here is that he’s offering a hard moral realism without surrendering to cynicism: great achievements are judged by their consequences, not the cleanliness of the hands that produced them.