"Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere"
About this Quote
A line like this lands with the bracing chill of a prayer that’s also an indictment. Lewis isn’t fantasizing about rockets; he’s puncturing the modern habit of treating “progress” as moral alchemy. The sting is in the word iniquity: not error, not ignorance, but culpable wrong. It’s the language of sin, which makes the target bigger than any one policy or invention. If the human problem is spiritual, then exporting ourselves to Mars just exports the same interior rot, scaled up with better tools.
The quote works because it twists the space-age dream into a theological nightmare. Escape is usually framed as liberation: leaving behind scarcity, politics, history. Lewis flips it: Earth isn’t the prison; we are. That reversal carries a quiet satire of utopian technologists and imperial adventurers alike, the types who imagine new frontiers automatically produce new ethics. He suggests the opposite: power amplifies character. A species that can’t govern its appetites on one planet has no business franchising them across the cosmos.
Context matters. Lewis wrote in a century that watched industrial ingenuity feed two world wars and mass propaganda. The period’s faith in scientific advancement had a body count, and Lewis, a Christian moralist with a sharp eye for self-deception, refused to confuse capability with goodness. The “Let’s pray” isn’t pious wallpaper; it’s a dare. If we want the stars, he implies, we’d better become the kind of creatures who won’t turn them into a wider stage for the same old crimes.
The quote works because it twists the space-age dream into a theological nightmare. Escape is usually framed as liberation: leaving behind scarcity, politics, history. Lewis flips it: Earth isn’t the prison; we are. That reversal carries a quiet satire of utopian technologists and imperial adventurers alike, the types who imagine new frontiers automatically produce new ethics. He suggests the opposite: power amplifies character. A species that can’t govern its appetites on one planet has no business franchising them across the cosmos.
Context matters. Lewis wrote in a century that watched industrial ingenuity feed two world wars and mass propaganda. The period’s faith in scientific advancement had a body count, and Lewis, a Christian moralist with a sharp eye for self-deception, refused to confuse capability with goodness. The “Let’s pray” isn’t pious wallpaper; it’s a dare. If we want the stars, he implies, we’d better become the kind of creatures who won’t turn them into a wider stage for the same old crimes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dark Humor |
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