Quotes from Theodore Dalrymple

One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.

And if I paint a picture of a way of life that is wholly without charm or merit, and describe many people who are deeply unattractive, it is important to remember that, if blame is to be apportioned, it is the intellectuals who deserve most of it. They should have known better but always preferred to avert their gaze. They considered the purity of their ideas to be more important than the actual consequences of their ideas. I know of no egotism more profound.

A taste for kitsch among the well-to-do is a sign of spiritual impoverishment; but among the poor, it represents a striving for beauty, an aspiration without the likelihood of fulfilment.

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.

Under communism all minorities dance.

When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as 'nonjudgmental.' For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.

They are like people who imagine that the answer to constipation is diarrhoea.

That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos—that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished—is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.

ideology that 'gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

but only a moment's reflection is necessary to realize that, where there is a choice of incarceration and so-called community sentencing, a reduction in the rate of recidivism is perfectly compatible with a rise, even a huge rise, in the numbers of crimes committed; and vice versa, with a rise in the rate of recidivism coincident with a fall, even a dramatic fall, in the rate of crime.

Tocqueville understood, as few modern writers do, that pauperism is above all a psychological, not an economic, condition.

There is, in fact, no better way to produce shallow and superficial people than to let them live their lives entirely in the open, without concealment of anything.

The only thing worse than having a family, I discovered, is not having a family. My rejection of bourgeois virtues as mean-spirited and antithetical to real human development could not long survive contact with situations in which those virtues were entirely absent; and a rejection of everything associated with one's childhood is not so much an escape from that childhood as an imprisonment by it.

pride must be in the work, not the person.

since no mass murder takes place without its perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms.

If humankind, as T. S. Eliot put it, cannot bear very much reality, it seems that it can bear any amount of unreality.

One of the reasons that the area would never be renovated, however, was the council's insistence that each house had three large plastic trash-bins on wheels, each a bright color: green for the bottles left over from last night's drunken orgy, red for stolen goods now surplus to requirements, purple for dead bodies and used syringes, all in fact that a modern British urban household needs to disembarrass itself of.

an attachment to his culture is, for the European, the beginning of the slippery slope.

argued, with the inventive cunning that each of us possesses when a pet theory of ours is refuted by the evidence

the residence of Margaret McMillan, who some 90 years ago founded the British nursery-school movement and agitated for improvements in working-class education. Nowadays, there is not a white face to be seen in the square, nor that of any woman. It is strictly men only on the street, dressed as for the North-West Frontier (apart, incongruously, from their sneakers); a group of them perpetually mills around outside the house that functions as a madrassa, or

The oikophobe does not want sharia or Aztec human sacrifice, or any other foreign custom, in his own country. What he wants is power within it, and oikophobia is an instrument to achieve it by delegitimizing those he thinks already have it. He wants to replace one ruling class, as he sees it, with another – his own.

The oikophobe and the multiculturalist are not really interested in other cultures, except as instruments with which to beat their fellow citizens.

The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.

The triumph of the doctrine of the sovereignty of sentiment over sense would have delighted the Romantics, no doubt, but it has promoted an unconscionable amount of misery.