High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

The remark draws a sharp distinction between personal virtue and public or historical achievement. It suggests that admirable outcomes—political reforms, humanitarian victories, moral advances—can be produced by people who are themselves flawed, compromised, or even vicious in private life. The implication is anti-hagiographic: moral progress should be judged by results and principles rather than by the saintliness of its agents. In Hitchens’s polemical style, it also functions as a warning against moral credentialism (the idea that only the “pure” may speak or act) and against the religious tendency to equate goodness with personal piety. It invites a more realistic, sometimes tragic view of how moral change occurs.