High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
Interpretation
Moral integrity isn't necessarily required to achieve significant moral deeds.
This quote by Christopher Hitchens suggests that one doesn't have to possess a high moral character to achieve significant moral accomplishments. It challenges the notion that ethical behavior inherently leads to great acts of morality, indicating that circumstances and intentions can also play crucial roles in achieving great deeds, regardless of one's personal character.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the complexities of ethics in leadership.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way β because itβs had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But youβve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
Every area of trouble gives out a ray of hope; and the one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.
Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.
Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.
The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for regime change.
It is for us to make the effort. The result is always in God's hands.
No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.