Category: Thought

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

C. S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” reprinted in God in the Dock (1970).

“I regard it as necessary to progress that we withdraw from philosophy all governmental and academic recognition and support. . . . Let philosophers spring up naturally, deny them every prospect of appointment, tickle them no longer with salaries — yea, persecute them! Then you will see marvels! They will then flee afar and seek a roof anywhere. Here a parsonage will open its doors; there a schoolhouse. One will appear upon the staff of a newspaper, another will write manuals for young ladies’ schools. The most rational of them will put his hand to the plough and the vainest will seek favor at court. Thus we shall get rid of bad philosophers.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer als Erzieher,” as translated by H. L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Third Edition, 1913), Chapter XII, Education.

“On the statute books of the great majority of American states there are laws so plainly opposed to all common-sense that they bear an air of almost pathetic humor.”

H. L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Third Edition, 1913), Chapter X, Government.

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

“Unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”

John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

“And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive,” or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity.” In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943

“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

“I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man’s milk and restorative cordial.”

Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, August 17, 1811