Many great thinkers and writers of the past could be appealed to here, but two of my all-time favourites will suffice: C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. Both had much to say about these topics.

Now, more than ever, with freedom and democracy teetering on the brink in so many places – especially here in the state of Victoria at the moment – we need to once again affirm liberty and human rights, and reject creeping totalitarianism, despotism and dictatorship. We can do this in part by recalling what others have said on such matters.

Many great thinkers and writers of the past could be appealed to here, but two of my all-time favourites will suffice: C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. Both had much to say about these topics. Chesterton the poet, author and newspaper columnist perhaps wrote much more than Lewis did on political matters and current events – so you will find more quotes from him featured here.

Lewis, the professor of English literature and Christian apologist did nonetheless manage to say various things about these topics as well. So let me begin with some quotes from him, and then move on to Chesterton. I have all the sources for the Lewis material, so I will offer the general reference after each quote. But not having all the specific references for the Chesterton quotes, I will just offer them without the citations.

C. S. Lewis

“I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man…Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.” —Present Concerns

“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.” —“The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock

“We are all at this moment helping to decide whether humanity shall retain all that has hitherto made humanity worth preserving, or whether we must slide down into the sub-humanity imagined by Mr Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and partially realised in Hitler’s Germany. For the extermination of the Jews really would have been ‘useful’ if the racial theories had been correct; there is no foretelling what may come to seem, or even to be, ‘useful’, and ‘necessity’ was always ‘the tyrant’s plea’.” —“The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock

“I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows. That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world…[S]ince we have sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that ‘all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality…Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us.”—“Membership,” in The Weight of Glory

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