Quotes from Theodore Dalrymple

Lawrence was an earnest, but not a serious, writer—if by serious we mean one whose outlook on life is intellectually or morally worthy of our consideration.

It goes without saying that the artists sympathized not with the actual working classes, but with their own idea of the working classes, rather as Marie Antoinette wished to live not as a real shepherdess but as her romanticized conception of a shepherdess.

The work of cultural destruction, while often swifter, easier, and more self-conscious than that of construction, is not the work of a moment. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.

There are few illicit pleasures greater than that of causing pain to others for their own, or some higher, good.

The drugs they take suppress their appetite: the nausea induced by heroin inhibits the desire to eat, while cocaine and its derivatives suppress it altogether.

And accordingly, the adolescent sensibility is one that prevails in much of the art world, where the most adolescent of goals, transgression, is still aimed at. Shock the parents, épater le bourgeois, such is the golden rule.

few are so conformist as rebellious youth.

Dreams may be the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud said they were, but if so it is a road that I don't want to go down.

It is curious how people's attitude to the existence of a supposedly empirical phenomenon depends so completely on their political outlook. It is as if policy determined facts and not facts policy. If people are against big government they tend to deny that there is any such phenomenon; if they are for big government they tend to regard it as established fact and equate those who deny its existence with Holocaust deniers.

If Custine were among us now, he would recognise the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people's souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question. Custine would demonstrate to us that, without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship. Custine

For them, the real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: 'How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?

If Custine were among us now, he would recognise the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people's souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question.

By attempting to tackle the sources of supply rather than those of demand, it will sidestep the question of an entire way of life—a problem that it would take genuine moral courage to tackle—and aim at an easy target instead.

This is the first time in history there has been mass denial that sexual relations are a proper subject of moral reflection or need to be governed by moral restrictions. The result of this denial, not surprisingly, has been soaring divorce rates and mass illegitimacy, among other phenomena. The sexual revolution has been above all a change in moral sensibility, in the direction of a thorough coarsening of feeling, thought, and behavior.

The reign of Elizabeth I had conferred this right, as a way of dealing with the epidemic of begging that followed the dissolution of the monasteries.

that since both the British policeman and the Nazi storm trooper wore a uniform, the British policeman was a brute. It is one of the chief characteristics of modern rhetoric, designed not so much to find the truth as (in the words of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam) to 'maintain your rage.

Manifesto's depiction of the relations between men and women was grossly distorted. His rage was therefore—as is so much modern rage—entirely synthetic

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

My mother, with her wrench by day and helmet by night, did more for civilisation (a word that Mrs. Woolf enclosed in quotation marks in Three Guineas, as if did not really exist) than Mrs. Woolf had ever done, with her jewelled prose disguising her narcissistic rage.

The college 'should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people's lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them.' Not being a systematic thinker, to put it kindly, Mrs. Woolf here fails to realise that she is proposing to enclose women in precisely the little domestic world from which she also claims to be rescuing them.

Had Mrs. Woolf survived to our time, however, she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind—shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal—had triumphed among the elites of the Western world.

it is widely believed that the purpose of art is to challenge, to question, to transgress, never to celebrate, to harmonise, to console, to give meaning.

George Orwell once said that he wanted to turn political writing into an art:

compassion being measured by the amount of other people's money you are prepared to pay for the supposed resolution of a social problem.