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Gaye's avatar

The line that most frequently comes to mind these days is this: “It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.” Some have tried to say C. S. Lewis only intended that to apply to atomic bombs and that it is wholly unsuited to our current situation, but I disagree.

He went on: “This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies [a microbe can do that] but they need not dominate our minds.”

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JRAlmo's avatar

Wow, this is so good. I’m going to add Munchausen and raise you Stockholm Syndrome and Sunk Cost Fallacy. Added together they are likely inescapable....

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