Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.

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, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.

In the British public service nothing succeeds like failure: indeed, failure is success, if looked on in the right way, namely as something requiring yet further intervention in people's lives to amend.

For intellectuals, everyone’s mind is closed but their own.

In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome.

His greatest fear, or nightmare, is not to be thought hip or cool, and if to avoid that terrible fate it means that he has to glamorize evil--well, so be it.

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.

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.

Over and over again, medical writers liken withdrawal [from heroin], at worst, to a dose of flu. … Let me ask the reader this: if you were given a choice between suffering a bout of flu in the above sense, or avoiding it by robbing someone in the street or breaking into a house and stealing its contents, which would you choose?

Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one’s own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience.

If all our political and intellectual elite offers by way of a national culture is “pop music, gambling, fashionable clothes or television,” then we can neither mount a convincing intellectual defense against our enemies, nor hope to integrate intelligent, inquiring, and unfulfilled Muslim youths—young men principally, of course—to our way of life.

Loose language suggests loose thought.

We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious.

Even [Marx], whose information about people came mainly from books, must have known that the 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, perhaps an attempt to assume a generosity of spirit, or love of mankind, that he knew he did not have but felt he ought to have