Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.

Margaret Atwood’s line is spoken by the Commander in her dystopian novel *The Handmaid’s Tale* (1985), during one of his private conversations with Offred. In the Republic of Gilead, the regime justifies stripping women of rights and enforcing rigid social roles by claiming it has created a “better” society—safer, more orderly, less sexually exploitative. The Commander frames Gilead’s changes as improvements over the past, but Offred’s lived reality exposes the cost of those “improvements”: coercion, surveillance, and systemic violence. The remark crystallizes the regime’s self-serving logic and its awareness that reform is unevenly distributed.

The quote argues that claims of social “betterment” are rarely neutral or universally shared: improvements for one group often depend on losses imposed on another. Atwood uses the line to puncture utopian rhetoric and expose how power rationalizes inequality—especially when authorities redefine “better” to mean stability, purity, or control. In *The Handmaid’s Tale*, the statement is chilling because it is both cynical and candid: the speaker admits that progress is purchased through harm, yet treats that harm as acceptable collateral. More broadly, the line invites readers to ask: better for whom, by whose standards, and at what cost?

“Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some.”