C.S. Lewis on disagreement

At the start of his career, Lewis could be something of a bully, and a number of his first students (most famously, the future poet laureate John Betjeman) did not flourish under that regime. By his early thirties, however, Lewis realized he was in danger of becoming “a hardened bigot shouting every one down till he had no friends left” (as he wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves): “You have no idea how much of my time I spend just hating people whom I disagree with.”

Alistair Fowler notes that “by the time I knew him, he usually remembered to avoid bigotry. His contentiousness was joy in debate; he never bullied me.” So Lewis went from pugnacity to magnanimity by way of corrigibility. He made the painful discovery that he had flaws and learned both how to concede when he made mistakes and how to correct himself publicly.