Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.

Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children.

Humor, fearlessness, seriousness, and honesty: the qualities that are hated with an equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies that are contending for tenure in the humanities departments of our universities.

Henceforth, virtue was not the exercise of discipline, self-control or benevolence for the sake of others, but the expression of the right opinions of the moment.

It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind.

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.

Nothing is easier - or more gratifying - than to apologise for what your ancestors, enemies or political opponents have done or omitted to do. We get the kudos for having apologised, they get the blame for what we apologise for.

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of sleepwalkers.

And the fact is that millions of opiates addicts having given up their habit without medical assistance.

I’m not actually against, for example, people going into rehabilitation, provided it is understood that this is not really a medical procedure. Often what happens is that people who are addicted to a substance — alcohol or opiates — have comprehensively messed up their lives, and since life is biography and not just a series of unconnected moments, it may be that they require some assistance in getting their lives together. But I don’t regard that as really a medical procedure.

When a population feels alienated from the legal system under which it lives, because that system fails to protect it from real dangers while lending succor and encouragement to every possible kind of wrongdoing, the population may well lose faith in the very idea of law. That is how civilization unravels.

There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic.

When the cold war ended, I thought, as no doubt did many others, that the age of ideology was over. Again like many others, I underestimated man’s need for transcendence, which, in the absence of religion or high culture, he is most likely to find in a political or social cause.

Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex.