The phrase has been repeated until it has lost all meaning except to the honest intellectual: 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' Thus spoke Socrates before the city that would decide shortly, and as all know too well, terminally, on the question of his life. His sentence was death, but his words have gained more life after his bodily expiration than he could have perhaps ever hoped. Socrates, the teacher, is far more immortal than nearly any human has ever been. He is certainly ahead of the world's dead dictators who etched their mark into stone and ground in futile rage against the fragility of life and slow release of aging. It seems plain that some intellectual power transcends time. Thus Socrates lives on while the dictators are lost to all, except the most erudite historian.
Hitchens himself said something to a similar effect. When confronted with the lack of perhaps a strong historicity of Socrates in a spirited debate, and thus with the possibility of Socrates' non-existence, Christopher said strongly (and I condense) "I do not care if he never lived, it is in his ideas that he was strong. The man is the conveyance." Indeed.
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