11.3.2025 – of all, tyrannies

of all, tyrannies
exercised for victims good
the most oppressive

Adapted from the passage:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

It would 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.

From “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” by C. S. Lewis, in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1970), 287–300.