“The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under.”
| The Screwtape Letters
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
“We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’.”
“The people never admire a man for doing something he likes; the very words ‘But he likes it’ imply the corollary ‘And therefore it has no merit’. Yet Kant stands the obvious truth, noted by Aristotle, that the more virtuous a man becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions.”
“Think of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The moral law is not any one instinct or set of instincts; it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.”
“The difference is that Christianity thinks this dark power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with duelism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war , a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.”
| Mere Chrisitanity