Quotes from Theodore Dalrymple

the throwing of tantrums must stand guarantor of life's significance and meaning.

As for snobbery, the intellectual raises himself above ordinary folk -- who still cling quixotically to standards, prejudices, and taboos -- by his thorough rejection of them. Unlike others, he is not a prisoner of his upbringing and cultural inheritance; and thus he proves the freedom of his spirit by the amorality of his conceptions.

The French state insists that once someone becomes French by citizenship, his ancestors become, metaphorically speaking, the Gauls, and he is therefore not to be distinguished from any other Frenchman, in statistics or anywhere else. It would take considerable conceptional subtlety as well as empirical knowledge to disentangle the truth and lies of all this.

We have sunk to a depth in which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Easily able to capture the lion's share of the aid that is given to their countries on the pretext that they are so poor, African elites have realised that there is wealth to be made from poverty.

large and honest, but indifferent or incompetent, state bureaucracy creates expectations that give rise to this dialectic of dependence and resentment, which does not exist in Italy, where no one would assume the honesty and therefore the benevolence of the public administration in the first place.

the great majority of heroin addicts who end up in prison had extensive criminal records before they ever took heroin.

the British government considers a tax cut, almost all newspapers, no matter of what political tendency, describe the measure as giving money away—indulging in a handout, like a parent doling out a weekly allowance to children.

In a democratic age, only the behaviour of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never. This is a modern version of Rousseau's doctrine: if it weren't for the authorities, the people would be good.

No doubt the decline of religion accounts for the rise in self-obsession and self-importance that is everywhere observable. One of the great advantages of the Christian philosophy was that it managed to reconcile the unique importance of each man with humility. Every man was important in the eyes of God, and in that sense was at home in the universe because the universe was expressly created for beings such as he.

At once more social and more self-reliant than their British counterparts, they were men whose dignity had not been destroyed by a culture of dependence.

But the fact that the debased culture of which rap music is a product receives such serious attention and praise deludes its listeners into supposing that nothing finer exists than what they already know and like. Such flattery is thus the death of aspiration, and lack of aspiration is, of course, one of the causes of passivity.

Well into her career, painters like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema or Léon Frédéric were still churning out the most dreadful pictures of childhood. Such artists strained after emotions, not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel.

Havana is like Beirut, without having gone through the civil war to achieve the destruction.

Alma-Tadema and Frédéric could paint nothing that was truthful either to the world or to themselves.

Middle-class friends of mine were appalled to discover that the spelling being taught to their daughter in school was frequently wrong; they were even more appalled when they drew it to the attention of the school's head teacher and were told it did not matter, since the spelling was approximately right and everyone knew anyway what the misspelling meant.

No man is so brilliant that he can work out everything for himself, so that the wisdom of ages has nothing useful to tell him. To imagine otherwise is to indulge in the most egotistical of hubris.

self-respect can encourage people to make the best of a bad job, but dependency on the state has destroyed the basis of self-respect.

The prevention of evil will always require more than desirable social arrangements: it will forever require personal self-control and the conscious limitation of appetites.

Given the gulf between the excellence of Italian design, educated by the beauties of the past, and the unremitting tastelessness of British modernity, it is not a coincidence that Italy has one of the largest trading surpluses of any nation, while Britain has one of the largest deficits.

the primrose path to earthly perdition.

Let us ask whether medicine is winning the war against death. The answer is obviously no, it isn't winning: the one fundamental rule of human existence remains, unfortunately, one man one death.

It has become all too typical of western youth, to mistake their personal angst for a universal political cause.

In the new Europe, in any case, nationalism is something of an anomaly, given that the drive is to the elimination of national boundaries and national sovereignty.