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by
C.S. Lewis
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August 18 - September 7, 2025
Odd thing it is—the word ‘experiment’ is unpopular, but not the word ‘experimental.’ You musn’t experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the NICE and it’s all correct!”
But the Fairy pointed out that what had hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was. And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention? Soon anyone who had ever been in the hands of the police at all would come under the control of the NICE; in the end, every citizen.
That’s what happens when you study men: you find mare’s nests. I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.”
Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.
(I wonder, by the bye, do human beings really like being happy?)
his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw.
there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.
you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it.
Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.”
“And you mean,” said Mark, “it will then be extended to all men?” “No,” said Filostrato. “I mean it will then be reduced to one man.
Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument.
“does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?”
He is our skeptic; a very important office.”
His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honor to help him.
“If you two quarrel much more,” said the Director, “I think I’ll make you marry one another.”
One of Ransom’s greatest difficulties in disputing with MacPhee (who consistently professed to disbelieve the very existence of the eldila) was that MacPhee made the common, but curious assumption that if there are creatures wiser and stronger than man they must be forthwith omniscient and omnipotent.
You could not have done it with nineteenth-century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt.
The thing you fear is impossible. Well and good. Can you therefore cease to fear it? Not here and now.
If you must see ghosts, it is better not to disbelieve in them.
For Mark liked to be liked.
There was a good deal of the spaniel in him.
Scientific examination (I cannot allow the word Torture in this context)
macrobes.”
The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs.
The approval of one’s own conscience is a very heady draft; and specially for those who are not accustomed to
It had never occurred to him that his mind could thus be changed for him, all in an instant of time, changed beyond recognition.
You might have expected that when a man behaved in that way the universe would back him up.
the very first moment you tried to be good, the universe let you down.
Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.
they themselves had passed and which had divided them from humanity, distending and dissipating Wither into a shapeless ruin while it condensed and sharpened Frost into the hard, bright, little needle that he now was.
They don’t even listen to what we say,’ I said. And do you know what she said? ‘Ivy Maggs,’ said she, ‘did it ever come into your mind to ask whether anyone could listen to all we say?’
The tramp was a type of man he had never met. The dupe, the terrified victim, the toady, the would-be accomplice, the rival, the honest man with loathing and hatred in his eyes, were all familiar to him. But not this.
I’m afraid there’s no niche in the world for people that won’t be either Pagan or Christian.
In fighting those who serve devils one always has this on one’s side; their Masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own Masters finish the work for us. They break their tools.”
The last scene of Dr. Faustus where the man raves and implores on the edge of Hell is, perhaps, stage fire. The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue bottle, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless
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links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul. So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way.
He had also a perfectly clear conscience and had played no tricks with his mind. He had never slandered another man except to get his job, never cheated except because he wanted money, never really disliked people unless they bored him.
