Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

Experience rarely teaches its lessons directly but instead requires interpretation through the filter of preconceived theories, prejudices, and desires. Where these are invincible, facts are weak things.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

In the welfare state, experience teaches nothing.

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?

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

In a democratic age, only the behavior of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never.

I am hesitant to write in a satirical vein because, as I and others have remarked, satire is prophecy. A number of current policies would have been regarded as satirical exaggeration only a few years ago. Who would have thought, say a decade ago, that a serious, or at any rate a prominent and powerful female politician (I refer here to the First Minister of Scotland), would argue that a man convicted of rape was actually, that is to say in reality, in fact, in every sense, a woman? Such propositions now elicit only irritation, not laughter; and irritation declines before long to resignation. Absurdity is first discussed, then adopted by a vanguard of intellectuals in search of a cause, and finally becomes an orthodoxy that it is socially unacceptable to question.

If consequences are removed from enough actions, then the very concept of human agency evaporates, life itself becomes meaningless, and is thenceforth a vacuum in which people oscillate between boredom and oblivion.

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.

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