C. S. Lewis Quotes

Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

Now celebrity has taken on a holy status all of its own, and we look to the stars to provide us with the transcendental experience that was once achieved through religion.

What the heck is a king? I'm a cog in the wheel.

The people who oppose your ideas are inevitably those who represent the established order that your ideas will upset.

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

Now, there's a desire for order, authority coming from a feeling that society has gone too far to the side of individualism and liberalism.

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

The prospect of being immortal doesn't excite me, but the prospect of being a materialistic idol for four years does appeal.

I didn't have any concept of age or authority. I remember realising, Oh, the world has rules and we don't.

But I don't believe in organised politics, organised religion, organised music, organised anything.

The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority

Man has been naturally so created that it is advantageous for him to be submissive, but disastrous for him to follow his own will, and not the will of his creator.

There must in every society be some power or other from which there is no appeal.

Wild beasts hate nets, and people hate their superiors.

Every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch; he is absolute, and recognizes nobody above him. His judgments, like the decrees of a monarch, spring from his own sovereign power and proceed directly from himself. He takes as little notice of authority as a monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself authorized it. On the other hand, those of vulgar minds, who are swayed by all kinds of current opinions, authorities, and prejudices, are like the people which in silence obey the law and commands.

… the imaginations of men are exceedingly prone to deify and worship them [kings]; though, to the great misfortune of mankind, they are more commonly fiends, than angels.

If it was up to me, there wouldn't be no such thing as the establishment.

There's only one thing people love more than their heroes, and that's stomping them into the ground.

I am a Conservative, so I don't wish to be seen as a rebel, particularly, at all.

Even though my parents raised me in a very individualistic way, they were also strict and traditional, which was good. It was hard to sneak out! I think I was quite wild, but in some ways quite contained.

In some ways I'm oddly traditional, I've been a serial monogamist since I was 12. I've always tried to work hard and get good grades and be a good person, but I feel like I've also always had a strange defiance of authority or the status quo, I've never understood why things always have to be just one way.

Resistance - that is the distinction of the slave. Let your distinction be obedience. Let your commanding itself be obeying!