Quotes from Douglas Murray

A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible.

si llegamos a la conclusión de que el diálogo respetuoso no conduce a ninguna parte, la única herramienta que nos queda es la violencia.

Internet nos ayuda a recordar, pero también nos lleva a abordar el pasado desde una extraña omnisciencia. Esto convierte al pasado -como todo lo demás- en rehén de cualquier arqueólogo con sed de venganza.

The 'rise of the far-right' in particular is such a trope in journalism that the far-right is said to be rising even when it is collapsing, as it did in Britain during the last decade.

Many of the claims made in French's book are tendentious and ahistorical. Once she has set up her paradigm she is able to make almost anything fit into it. But it is the dichotomy she insists on throughout which is most striking. Everything that is good is female. Everything that is bad is male.

Our public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over. Either because they mistake the barricades for home, or because they have no other home to go to. In each case a demonstration of virtue demands an overstating of the problem, which then causes an amplification of the problem.

Society may tolerate you. It may wish you well. But your desire to dress in lady's knickers is no reason to force everyone to use entirely new pronouns. Or to alter every public bathroom. Or to bring up children with the belief that there is no difference between the sexes and that gender is a social construct. If

Which leads to a question that everybody in genuinely diverse and pluralistic societies must at some point ask: 'Do we take other people at face value, or do we try to read behind their words and actions, claim to see into their hearts and there divine the true motives which their speech and actions have not yet revealed?

Estupefactos, nos adentramos por último en el territorio más pantanoso de todos: el de quienes afirman que entre nosotros hay un número considerable de personas que viven en un cuerpo equivocado y que, por tanto, las pocas certezas que le quedaban a la sociedad (incluidas las certezas arraigadas en la ciencia y el lenguaje) deben ser reformuladas de arriba abajo.

Sea como fuere, toda exhibición de virtud requiere exagerar los problemas, lo que a su vez hace que los problemas crezcan todavía más.

Como sabe cualquiera que haya vivido bajo un régimen totalitario, hay algo humillante y hasta autodestructivo en tener que marchar al son de consignas que uno no cree ni puede creer.

For three years between 2014 and 2017 academics in the UK carried out a study about the images of men that women found attractive. The results, published in Feminist Media Studies, discovered a disturbing trend. Newsweek summed up the shocking findings in a headline, 'Men with muscles and money are more attractive to straight women and gay men – showing gender roles aren't progressing.

All the rage – including the wild, destructive misandry, the double-think and the self-delusion – stem from this fact: that we are being not just asked, but expected, to radically alter our lives and societies on the basis of claims that our instincts all tell us cannot possibly be true.

The answer that has presented itself in recent years is to engage in new battles, ever fiercer campaigns and ever more niche demands. To find meaning by waging a constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question which may itself have just been reframed and the answer to which has only just been altered.

He was just one more demonstration of the fact that when the messenger was not actually shot, he or she was in other ways silenced as much as possible.1 But throughout the first decade of the century it was the early-warning sirens on blasphemy

The attractions of this new set of beliefs are obvious enough. It is not clear why a generation which can't accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism. And it isn't hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequity not just in their own lives but every inequity on earth.

Just as a popular strand of feminism turned from celebrating women to vilifying men, so a portion of black studies started attacking people who were not black. A discipline intended to de-stigmatize began to re-stigmatize

The least attractive-sounding of this trinity is the concept of 'intersectionality'. This is the invitation to spend the rest of our lives attempting to work out each and every identity and vulnerability claim in ourselves and others and then organize along whichever system of justice emerges from the perpetually moving hierarchy which we uncover. It is a system that is not just unworkable but dementing, making demands that are impossible towards ends that are unachievable

In her 2011 book Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility and Social Justice Pedagogy (2011) Applebaum explains how even white people who are avowedly anti-racist may still be racist. It is just that they are often racist in ways that they have not yet realized.

The consensus remained that the good thing to do was to invite all migrants in. The bad thing was to suggest any limitations on their numbers. Or even the enforcement of laws already in place. As so often in the past the government weighed up the pros and cons of holding the line and decided not to hold it.

In 2016 when Peter Thiel endorsed Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland he immediately became a non-gay in the eyes of the most prominent gay magazine in America. To have gone to the right – and to the Donald Trump right at that – was such an egregious fault that Advocate excommunicated Thiel from the church of gay. Two years later precisely the same pattern played out among black Americans. After

To speak for the people of Europe was to be on the side of the devil. And all the time there existed that strange assumption that Europe was simply letting one more person into the room. Whether that person was genuinely about to be killed in the corridor became immaterial. If he was cold, poor, or just worse off there than the people inside the room, he too had the right to come in.

Among the things these issues all have in common is that they have started as legitimate human rights campaigns. This is why they have come so far. But at some point all went through the crash barrier.

You cannot tell people simultaneously "You must understand me" and "You cannot understand me".' Evidently a whole lot of people can make those demands simultaneously. But they shouldn't, and if they do then they should realize that their contradictory demands cannot be granted.