Characters, ch. 9 (12); translation from R. C. Jebb and J. E. Sandys (trans.), The Characters of Theophrastus (London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 75.
“I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.”
The World's Last Night (1952)
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Clive Staples Lewis 272
Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist 1898–1963Related quotes
"How Not To Better Social Conditions" in Review of Reviews (January 1897), p. 39
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Source: Decent and Indecent: Our Personal and Political Behavior (1970), p. 13