Quotes from Theodore Dalrymple

Life is conceived as a vast supermarket through which one moves with one's shopping trolley, fetching down ways of life from shelves marked "Existential choices.

I suspect, though I cannot prove, that in part this is the consequence of living in a world, including a mental world, so thoroughly saturated by the products of the media of mass communication. In such a world, what is done or happens in private is not done or has not happened at all, at least not in the fullest possible sense.

Many of the rioters were obviously bourgeois, the scions of privileged families, as have been the leaders of so many destructive movements in modern history. That same evening, I dined in an expensive restaurant and saw there a fellow diner whom I had observed a few hours before joyfully heaving a brick through a window. How much destruction did he think his country could bear before his own life might be affected, his own existence compromised?

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will be confused. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything. Confucius's

the only way to eliminate hypocrisy from human existence is to abandon all principles whatsoever;

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

the knowledge, tastes, and social accomplishments of 13-year-olds are often the same as those of 28-year-olds. Adolescents are precociously adult; adults are permanently adolescent.

He spent five years between 2007 and 2012 in prison, in which he was "radicalized," that is to say, he was given (and adopted) an ideological justification for his psychopathic behavior.

The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.

Behaviorism entails the systematic denial of meaning, a denial which does violence to both the evidence and the everyday experience of humanity.

a being as dependent on his cultural inheritance as man cannot escape convention so easily: and the desire to do so has itself become a cliché.

Years later it is common for it to be thought that the possession of an opinion on a subject, which is active, is deemed more important than having any information on that subject, which is passive; and that the vehemence (feeling) with which an opinion is held is more important than the facts (knowledge) upon which it is based.

was Aristotle who said that a man who committed an offence while intoxicated was doubly guilty: first of the offence itself, and second of having intoxicated himself.

even received a few requests that I send medicine, since none was available in the local pharmacies—an admission, unthinkable a few years ago, that all is not well in the much-vaunted health-care system.

It is the prerogative of the unthinkingly prosperous to sneer at the bourgeois virtues.

Cowardly multiculturalism thus makes itself the handmaiden of anti-Western extremism.

history is nothing but the backward projection of current grievances, real or imagined, used to justify and inflame resentment.

The object of such historiography is to disconnect everyone from a real sense of a living past and a living culture.

Pauperism is above all a psychological, not an economic, condition.

In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.

And once again sentimentality seems to be dialectically related to violence and brutality, in imagination if not in deed.

Linguistic and educational relativism helps to transform a class into a caste – a caste, almost, of Untouchables.

Where two pieties—feminism and multiculturalism—come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.

Custine described them as 'automata inconvenienced with a soul': a description true, perhaps, of all bureaucrats fearful for their jobs but truest of all where power is both arbitrary and completely centralised, as it was in Russia.