Khari’s Reviews > The Screwtape Letters > Status Update

"In discussing joint action, it becomes obligatory that A should argue in favor of B's supposed wishes and against his own, while B does the opposite. It is often impossible to find out either party's real wishes; with luck, they end by doing something that neither wants, while each feels a glow of self-righteousness and harbors a secrete claim to preferential treatment for the unselfishness shown ..."

"A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others...Thus while the woman thanks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people's rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish."

"Note, once again, the admirable work of our Philological Arm in substituting the negative unselfishness for the Enemy's positive Charity. Thanks to this you can, from the very outset, teach a man to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them."

"Once they know that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. WE have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective 'unchanged' we have substituted the emotional adjective 'stagnant.' "

Screwtape: "The Enemy...wants men...to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking 'Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?' They will neglect the relevant questions..."

"The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic."

"The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice."

"Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's beliefs that they 'own' their bodies"-those vast and perilous states, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another."

"The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in heaven and in hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's beliefs that they 'own' their bodies"-those vast and perilous states, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves ....