The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
"A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966)
Some of these ideas were included in the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949) (see below).
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may 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.”
"The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949), p. 292
Similar statements were included in "A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946) (see above), published posthumously.
God in the Dock (1970)
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Clive Staples Lewis 272
Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist 1898–1963Related quotes
R. v. Inhabitants of Darlington (1792), 4 T. R. 800.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 274.
“Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.”
Speech to the thirtieth anniversary of the Junior Imperial League in Kingsway Hall (19 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 17-18.
1926
Context: You have to realize that these years in which we are living, the years into which we are entering, are going to be, as no years before have been, the real testing-time of democracy... We in this country may make a fearful mess of it; and if we make a mess of it, we shall get something much worse— we shall get a tyranny of some kind or other. I don't know what form of tyranny it may be. It may be the communist tyranny; it may be tyranny from the other end. But if you cannot evolve a sound and sane democracy, that will be the fate of the country.
“Our torments also may in length of time
Become our Elements.”
Source: Paradise Lost
ibn Hazm's style of ending a work, in Salim al-Hassani, Ibn Hazm’s Philosophy and Thoughts on Science https://muslimheritage.com/ibn-hazm-philosophy-and-science/#_ftnref23
1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)