Quotes from Theodore Dalrymple

the state looms large in all our lives, not only in its intrusions but in our thoughts: for so thoroughly have we drunk at the wells of collectivism that we see the state always as the solution to any problem, never as an obstacle to be overcome. One can gauge how completely collectivism has entered our soul – so that we are now a people of the government, for the government, by the government – by a strange but characteristic British locution.

In 1927, Robert Graves published a little book called *Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language*. He noted a recent decline in the use of foul language by the English, and predicted that this decline would continue indefinitely, until foul language had all but disappeared from the average man's vocabulary. History has not borne him out, to say the least: indeed, I have known economists make more accurate predictions.

When you are harried, browbeaten, cajoled, bullied, pursued, threatened, bribed and surveyed by the state and its agencies, you have little inclination left over for obedience: least of all obedience to what one judge called the unenforceable. You have already paid your dues to society. Society can now look after itself. In the small sphere left to you, you will do exactly what you please, without regard to anyone else.

The lesson is that any powerful emotion or desire, however virtuous in many circumstances, can be turned to evil purposes if it escapes ethical control.

True, its people were much better off in material terms at the end of the century than at its outset, but man's sense of well-being depends upon comparison with others as well as upon his absolute condition.

To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilised men to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilised men have done worse than nothing—they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians.

Flea markets are also now legal in Cuba, and a petty trade in cast-off clothing and household goods takes place. Twelve years ago it was unthinkable for anyone to buy or sell anything in the open, for buying and selling were symptoms of bourgeois individualism and contrary to Fidel's socialist vision, in which everything is to be rationed—rationally, as it were—according to need. (In practice, of course, this meant rationing according to what there was, which was not much.)

The Real Me may actually have no obvious connection to the Me as it acts in the world and appears to others. It is a secret and beautiful garden only accessible only by means of psychology

Most men and women must suppress the good within them to be evil; just as, to be good, they must suppress the evil. There is no final victory of one or the other. Indeed

If people demand sexual liberty for themselves, but sexual fidelity from others, the result is the inflammation of jealousy, for it is natural to suppose that one is being done by as one is doing to others – and jealousy is the most frequent precipitant of violence between the sexes.

We need everyone who suffers to be a victim because only thus can we maintain our pretense to universal understanding and experience the warm glow of our own compassion, so akin to the warmth that a strong, stiff drink imparts in the cold.

every psychic defence mechanism known to the modern psychologist makes its appearance somewhere in Shakespeare.

And we even recognise the apparent paradox that some limitations to our freedoms have the consequence of making us freer overall.

They brought even their goats with them; and one goat can undo in an afternoon what it has taken decades to establish.

A man may despise himself for being as he is, but that does not absolve him of the responsibility for being as he is.

Self-esteem is a concept that belongs to the psychology of the Real Me. The Real Me, of course, is someone who is inherently good and admirable: Man being by nature good, inside every bad man there's a good one trying to get out, obstructed, alas, by such phenomena as low self-esteem.

But life is not a matter of double-entry book-keeping. No number of years in prison can be equivalent to the torture and killing of children: if it were, the term could be served in advance and the person who served it would be entitled to commit his crimes on his release.

The study of the form is the betting man's philology, philosophy, science, and literary criticism all rolled into one.

Zweig viewed the Nazis as beneath contempt. Their doctrine and world outlook being so obviously ridiculous and morally odious, why waste time refuting them?

largely because high minimum wages, payroll taxes, and labour protection laws make employers loath to hire those whom they cannot easily fire, and whom they must pay beyond what their skills are worth.

One's past is not one's destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is. If henceforth I were miserable, it would be my own fault: and I vowed never to waste my substance on petty domestic conflict.

comes as a genuine shock to parents of children to whom nothing has been denied that they should turn out selfish, demanding and intolerant of the slightest frustration.

they become addicted to heroin with what can only be called determination, as others become aficionados of wine or postage stamps.

learned that there is no more heartless saying than that the people get the government they deserve