on courage

I was reminded of this quote while listening to an NPR story this morning about fears of a terrorist attack via a nuclear device. The admonition still stands today.

Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented; and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways . . . It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists had 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 but a certainty . . . Let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, 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 (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

- C.S. Lewis, writing on the atomic bomb (citation forthcoming)