Quotes from Theodore Dalrymple

To treat all people with equal contempt and indifference is the bureaucrat's idea of equity.

Demonstrative proof is lacking, but if we thought only about those things about which such proof were available, our minds would be empty most of the time.

man who thinks he is guarding himself against prejudices [by which he means inherited moral standards and taboos] by resisting the authority of others, leaves open every avenue to singularity, vanity, self-conceit, obstinacy, and many other vices, all tending to warp the judgment.

the European Union is like a giant pension fund for defunct politicians, who either cannot get elected in their own countries or are tired of the struggle to do so. It is a way for politicians to remain important and powerful, at the center of a web of patronage, after their defeat or loss of willingness to expose themselves to the rigors of the electoral process.

Fascism is not fashion.

security—the feeling that nothing could change seriously for the worse, and that the life that you had was invulnerable—was illusory and even dangerous.

Like all other virtues, patriotism when carried to excess becomes a vice; but that does not mean that patriotism is incompatible with respect for others.

We should remember that there are few pleasures greater than promoting your moral enthusiasms at other people's expense.

A healthy modern society must know how to remain the same as well as change, to conserve as well as to reform. Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.

However, it has long been known that diazepam and other similar drugs cause falls in the elderly, and such falls are often the precursor of death. It has also been suspected that, by some unspecified mechanism, diazepam (and sleeping draughts of all kinds) promote death. A

a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.' Oscar Wilde

The logic of an arms race came to rule in art: and legions of untalented hacks who came after Miró devoted themselves to thinking about what had never been done before rather than about what they wanted to express.

more likely that tattooing the name is a substitute for solicitude rather than evidence of it.

The social and cultural critic Theodor Adorno eloquently voiced this cast of mind when he proclaimed the final death of art after the Second World War. After Auschwitz, he said, it was no longer possible to produce fine art. The world had become too horrible. 'There is nothing innocuous left,' he declared. 'The

The evils of envy and hatred masquerading as humanitarian idealism had darkened his life from its outset, stamping him as a man quick to search for the reality behind the expression of fine sentiments.

The complacent disregard by the latter of the social catastrophe wrought in the former appalls me almost as much as the catastrophe itself.

One is reminded of Lenin, who denied himself the pleasures of listening to Beethoven because it so reconciled him to the world that he wanted afterward to pat children on the head: a terrible weakness in a man who wanted to hit hard, who believed in the liberating powers of violence.

It is one thing for traditions to die out of themselves; it is quite another for them to be killed by men who think they know everything, by men whose vengeance extends even to the past, even to the dead.

É da natureza dos regimes plebiscitários que sejam realizados plebiscitos até a população acertar a resposta que o líder ou a elite bem-pensante tem por correta; nesse caso, nenhum plebiscito ulterior se faz necessário – ao menos acerca do mesmo tema.

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilised—that men become fully human.

Good intentions are certainly no guarantee of good results.

We must both recognise the limitations imposed upon us by our natures and at the same time not give up striving to control ourselves. If we fail to do either, we shall succumb to ideological or instinctual beastliness—or (the curious achievement of our own age) to both.

ideological aim: to subvert the very concept and deny the possibility of virtue, and therefore of the necessity for restraint.

Only a man with a heart of stone could read of the death of Little Nell without laughing.' Oscar Wilde