Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.

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.

Incidentally, many thousands of American servicemen addicted themselves to heroin in Vietnam, but two years after their repatriation their rate of addiction was no greater than that of draftees who were to go to Vietnam, but never did go because the war had ended.

The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty.

Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.

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?

For the sake of democracy, vigorous, civilized debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.

It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised.

What youth considers liberation, maturity considers tasteless excess.

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.