A sick society must think much about politics as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind--if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else--then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.

C. S. Lewis, cited in Jacob Culberson, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Literature"