Quotes by Theodore Dalrymple - Page 1

To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Civilization
Regret
Western Civilization
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Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Age
America
Stupid
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Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Benign
Habit
Order
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All forms of human happiness contain within themselves the seeds of their own decomposition.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Human Happiness
Seeds
Forms
Contain
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Equality of Ugliness: If we can't all live in a beautiful place we must all live in an ugly place.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Beautiful
Ifs
Ugly
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When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Gratitude
Justice
Rights
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There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Intellectual
Likes
Mind
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Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Feel Good
Feelings
Important
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How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Doe
Path
People
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The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Aim
Pay
When Things Go Wrong
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A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Moral
People
Taken
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Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Evil
May
Vices
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Parents are perhaps the most common object of resentment, the people who are most frequently blamed for all our failings and failures alike.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Resentment
Alike
Blamed
Failings
Frequently
Object
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It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Men
Becoming
Desire
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If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Century
Ingenuity
Way
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Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Biographies
Life Is
Patterns
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There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Misery
People
Vices
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Nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that . . . everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Men
Doctrine
Mind
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There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Decision
Responsibility
Weight
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The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Men
Ideas
Law
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The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Heroism
Humble
Struggle
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We all resort to the ad hominem from time to time: in human affairs, it is difficult to avoid it, and probably not desirable. After all, our opponents are human. The proper use of an ad hominem argument, however, still requires evidence to back it up.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Argument
Desirable
Difficult
Evidence
Opponents
Ad
Affairs
After
Avoid
From Time To Time
However
Human Affairs
Proper
Requires
Resort
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The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Men
Beautiful
Blank
Blank Paper
Character
Honest
Human Nature
Implications
Mao
Paper
Nature Most Beautiful Beautiful
Characters
Nature Beautiful Most Beautiful
Cults
Disastrous
Mention
Most Beautiful
Old One
Sheet
Survive
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I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties--feminism and multi-culturalism--come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Feminist
Silence
Two
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I do not think it possible for anyone to get by in life without prejudice. However, the attempt to do so leads many people to suppose that, in order to decide any moral question, they have to find an indubitable first principle from which they can deduce an answer.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Moral
Prejudice
Life People Find
Attempt
Deduce
However
Leads
Suppose
Principle
Question
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It is clear to me that people often want incompatible things. They want danger and excitement on the one hand, and safety and security on the other, and often simultaneously. Contradictory desires mean that life can never be wholly satisfying or without frustration.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Clear
Contradictory
Danger
Excitement
Frustration
Safety
Satisfying
Security
Life Me People
Desires
Hand
Incompatible
Simultaneously
Wholly
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So what exactly are the rewards of resentment. It is always a relief to know that the reason we have failed in life is not because we lack the talent, energy, or determination to succeed, but because of a factor that is beyond our control and that has loaded the dice decisively against us.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Determination
Dice
Loaded
Relief
Resentment
Rewards
Succeed
Life Always Energy
Failed
Factor
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Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Gambling
Garden
Loss
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Many young people now end a discussion with the supposedly definitive and unanswerable statement that such is their opinion, and their opinion is just as valid as anyone else's. The fact is that our opinion on an infinitely large number of questions is not worth having, because everyone is infinitely ignorant.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Discussion
Ignorant
Opinion
Definitive
Infinitely
Large
Large Number
Statement
Supposedly
Valid
Young People
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Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Children
Growing Up
Years
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Considering the importance of resentment in our lives, and the damage it does, it receives scant attention from psychiatrists and psychologists. Resentment is a great rationalizer: it presents us with selected versions of our own past, so that we do not recognize our own mistakes and avoid the necessity to make painful choices.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Attention
Choices
Considering
Damage
Importance
Mistake
Our Lives
Painful
Past
Resentment
Selected
Versions
Mistakes
Avoid
Presents
Psychiatrists
Receives
Scant
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The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called 'the two greatest gifts of God-the soul and the speech which communicates it.' People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Fate
Lying
Two
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The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Men
Loss
Religious
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When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Liars
Lying
People
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In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost." But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
War
Stupid
Wife
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Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems.
Theodore Dalrymple / Writer
Men
Character
Class
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