Tyler Storey’s Reviews > The Screwtape Letters > Status Update

The justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned only with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself.

“But hatred is best combined with fear. Cowardice alone of all the vices, is purely painful—horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame.”

A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned “Experience is the mother of illusion”

And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so.

“For the descriptive adjective ‘unchanged’ we have substituted the emotional adjective ‘stagnant.’ “
We have trained them to think of the future as a promised land which favored heroes attain – Not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour

“It is always the novice who exaggerates”

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied.

Males are best turned into gluttons with the help of their vanity

Her ‘properly’ conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal pleasures, which she imagines she remembers from the past