Best 40 quotes of Theodore Dalrymple on MyQuotes

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.

Considering the importance of resentment in our lives, and the damage it does, it receives scant attention from psychiatrists and psychologists. Resentment is a great rationalizer: it presents us with selected versions of our own past, so that we do not recognize our own mistakes and avoid the necessity to make painful choices.

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

Equality of Ugliness: If we can't all live in a beautiful place we must all live in an ugly place.

Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost." But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.

I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties--feminism and multi-culturalism--come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.

Nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that . . . everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.

Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

So what exactly are the rewards of resentment. It is always a relief to know that the reason we have failed in life is not because we lack the talent, energy, or determination to succeed, but because of a factor that is beyond our control and that has loaded the dice decisively against us.

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.

There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems.

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish notion that only the oppressed can achieve righteousness or - more importantly - write anything profound.

É da natureza dos regimes plebiscitários que sejam realizados plebiscitos até a população acertar a resposta que o líder ou a elite bem-pensante tem por correta; nesse caso, nenhum plebiscito ulterior se faz necessário – ao menos acerca do mesmo tema.

Facts are much more malleable than prejudices.

For good or ill, God is dead in Europe and I do not see much chance of revival except in the wake of catastrophe. Not quite everything has been lost of the religious attitude, however; individuals still think of themselves as a being of unique importance, but without the countervailing humility of considering themselves to have a duty towards the author of their being, a being inconceivably larger than themselves. Far from inducing a more modest self-conception in man, the loss of religious belief has inflamed his self-importance enormously.

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me. Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency.

In the new Europe, in any case, nationalism is something of an anomaly, given that the drive is to the elimination of national boundaries and national sovereignty.

It has often been said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools; it would be more accurate to say that socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals...

It is obvious that for human beings to be free, they need to live in a rule-bound society. There is an analogy here with language. There are many modern educationists who believe that teaching children the standard grammar of their language, which they may not learn at home or in their social environment, is harmful, not only to their self-esteem because it suggests to them that something that they are already doing, naturally as it were, is not perfect, but to their creativity. In other words, such teaching limits their freedom by putting them in a linguistic straitjacket. It is obvious, however, that mastery of the standard language (whether or not they choose to exercise it) widens the scope of their freedom very considerably, and makes available to them far more than it precludes.

Just as Leninists knew what was good for the proletariat, thereby conferring on themselves a gratifyingly providential role, so the environmentalists now know what is good for humanity and likewise confer on themselves a providential role. The beauty of preservation of the environment as a cause is that it is so large that it would justify almost any ends used to achieve it, for a livable environment is the sine qua non of everything else. You can demonstrate and riot for the good of humanity to your heart’s content; your questions about what life is for are answered.

Multiculturalism rests on the supposition—or better, the dishonest pretense—that all cultures are equal and that no fundamental conflict can arise between the customs, mores, and philosophical outlooks of two different cultures.

Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.

Needless to say, the self-hatred of Western intellectuals is not genuine or sincere: they do not really want to beat our supermarkets into souks, as swords into ploughshares ... Rather, the intellectual's expression of self-hatred is directed at other Western intellectuals, to prove the self-hater's broadness of mind, moral superiority and lack of prejudice, and thus earn the approval of his peers. It isn't only rebellious youth who experience peer pressure... Unfortunately, insincere ideas can become official orthodoxies, with very real consequences. The Muslims of this country are hardly to blame if they do not realise that the posturings of our intellectuals are just that, posturings, not intended to be taken literally. When the intellectuals of this country express no admiration for or appreciation of the cultural achievements of their civilisation's past, when only denigration and iconoclasm appear to advance an intellectual's career, when moral stature is measured by the vehemence of denunciation of past or present abuses, real or imagined, it is hardly surprising that Muslims conclude that the West is eminently hateful; it must be, because it hates itself. They haven't heard of Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess.

The way to a tyrant's heart is through a doctorate

What do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were-poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egalitarian redistribution of wealth-even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.