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“Doesn’t it seem to you that acting against one’s will, under protest and compulsion, is tantamount to being a slave?”
― Discourses and Selected Writings
― Discourses and Selected Writings
“Act Well the Part That Is Given to You We are like actors in a play. The divine will has assigned us our roles in life without consulting us. Some of us will act in a short drama, others in a long one. We might be assigned the part of a poor person, a cripple, a distinguished celebrity or public leader, or an ordinary private citizen. Although we can’t control which roles are assigned to us, it must be our business to act our given role as best as we possibly can and to refrain from complaining about it. Wherever you find yourself and in whatever circumstances, give an impeccable performance. If you are supposed to be a reader, read; if you are supposed to be a writer, write.”
― The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness
― The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness
“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression has been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of SOME conditions that exist in today’s society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”
― Industrial Society and Its Future
― Industrial Society and Its Future
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”
― 1984
― 1984
“As we got busier and busier, we paid less and less attention to the mail, and I have since met more than one friend who clearly felt that I had gotten so big for my britches that I had chosen to ignore his heartfelt message. Most of the messages were pretty straightforward, but there were a few weirdos in the bunch. One poor man, obviously deranged, wrote from Israel, enclosing reams of data on the gigantic ants that infested the moon. It would be disaster, he pointed out, for the LM to come down on or near one of these anthills, and he would be happy to provide us with his detailed maps showing the location of each hill—for a price, of course.”
― Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey
― Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey
Lewis’s 2025 Year in Books
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