Wit & Attitude Quote by Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens takes the sentimental fog that usually surrounds parenthood and burns it off with a colder, older truth: having children is a wager on your own disappearance. The shock in the phrasing ("make damn sure") is doing deliberate work. It drags what polite culture keeps implicit into the open: the moral order of generations depends on parents accepting their own exit as the preferred outcome. If you need a reason the line hits, its because it reverses the usual fantasy that children are an extension of the self; here, they are evidence you are temporary.

The tree-and-house analogy is classic Hitchens: practical, unsparing, faintly contemptuous of self-dramatization. Planting and building are acts of faith with a deadline. You labor for a future you won't get to consume, and thats the point. The subtext is anti-narcissism. Parenthood, in this framing, is not about personal fulfillment or legacy-as-brand; its a disciplined transfer of care, knowledge, and opportunity to people who will outlast your tastes, your politics, your era.

Context matters: Hitchens lived as a public contrarian, suspicious of comforting lies, then faced mortality in full view. The quote reads like someone insisting that the only honest consolations are structural, not spiritual: civilization survives because individuals consent to be replaced. Its a bracing, almost evolutionary version of love - less Hallmark than hard infrastructure - and it lands because it treats continuity as something you build, not something you are owed.