Best 16 quotes of Douglas Murray on MyQuotes

Algerian President Houari Boumedienne who in 1974 told the General Assembly of the United Nations, ‘One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.

A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible. The less that was successfully said, the greater the relief and acclaim. No attempt to address any idea, history or fact was able to pass without first being put through the pit-stop of the modern academy. No generality could be attempted and no specific could be uttered.

At the height of the 2015 crisis the single offer the Saudis did make was to build 200 new mosques in Germany for the benefit of the country’s new arrivals.

Charles Martel’s victory at the Battle of Tours in 732 is recognised for having prevented the spread of Islam throughout Europe.

Efforts to silence the people who raised their voice – whether through violence, intimidation or the courts – meant that three decades after the Rushdie affair there was almost no one in Europe who would dare write a novel, compose a piece of music or even draw an image that might risk Muslim anger. Indeed, they ran in the other direction. Politicians and almost everybody else went out of their way to show how much they admired Islam.

Europeans have been deflating the language of anti-fascism ahead of a time when they might need it.

Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism.

For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead.

For the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the German Lutheran Church and many other branches of European Christianity, the message of the religion has become a form of left-wing politics, diversity action and social welfare projects.

In the wake of Cologne and other similar attacks one could hear the language deteriorate around the fringes. Street movements began to talk of all arrivals into Europe as ‘rapefugees’. In Paris I met an elected official who referred to all migrants as ‘refu-jihadists’. These were unamusing as well as insulting terms for anybody who knew first hand that some at least of the people who had come were fleeing rape or escaping jihad.

Only because of the strength of a coalition of European armies at the battle of Vienna in 1683 did Europe avoid Ottoman rule.

The Bible had at best become like the work of Ovid or Homer: containing great truth, but not itself true.

The millions and millions of corpses, the wasted lives that communism left behind as testament to its main accomplishment, were enough to give any sane believer pause. There were some true believers left, like the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, but the world generally reacted to them with the incredulity deserved for a person standing on top of a pile of corpses promising that with just a few more deaths he could make the whole thing right.

They are an American Delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologize for the crusades', said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.

[They] may have for instance taken the view of Edmund Burke, who in the 18th century made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.

When it comes to anti-fascism in most of Western Europe, there would appear for now to be a supply-and-demand problem: the demand for fascists vastly outstrips the actual supply.