Douglas Murray Quotes

Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair.

It is wholly unsurprising that studies show an increase in anxiety, depression and mental illness in young people today. Rather than being a demonstration of 'snowflake'-ism it is a wholly understandable reaction to a world whose complexities have squared in their lifetimes. A perfectly reasonable response to a society propelled by tools that can provide endless problems but no answers.

Contra all the assurances and expectations, the people who came into Europe did not throw themselves into our culture and become a part of it. They brought their own cultures. And they did so at the precise moment that our own culture was at a point that it lacked the confidence to argue its own case.

To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness.

Edmund Burke made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.

There are many facets to this war on the West. It is carried out across the media and airwaves, and throughout the education system, from as early as preschool. It is rife within the wider culture, where all major cultural institutions are either coming under pressure or actually volunteering to distance themselves from their own past... We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden eggs.

[T]his is one occasion when saying that some people are worse than the Nazis is not hyperbole.
Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler's were rarely proud of their average days' work. Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up.
Many spent their evenings getting blind drunk to try to forget. Nazi commanders had to worry about staff "morale".

One of the strange habits of our time is the one in which a self-appointed class roams the land, hands cupped to their ear, hoping to discern something they can identify as a ‘dog-whistle’... One oddity of the whole business of trying to hear dog-whistles is very basic: if you can hear the whistle, you must surely be the dog. It is the nature of the analogy that a non-canid cannot hear what the dog hears. So to be able to hear on a whole different aural wave-length to everyone else – to be peculiarly attuned to the tones of the time and to be able to explain to everyone else – is one heck of a power to bestow upon yourself.

Today the West faces challenges without and threats within. But no greater threat exists than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies, piece by piece. By assaulting the majority populations in these countries. By saying that our histories are entirely reprehensible and have nothing good to be said about them. By claiming that everything in our past that has led up to our present is irredeemably riddled with sin and that while these same sins have beset every society in history, the debtor should knock at only one door. And most importantly by those who pretend that a civilization that has given more to the world in knowledge, understanding, and culture than any other in history somehow has nothing whatsoever to be said for it.

Sweden in 1950 was an ethnically homogeneous society with almost no migration. A century on it will look an almost entirely different place. And within the life-spans of many of us it is fair to say that such a country - like most other countries in Western Europe - will become unrecognisable even to fairly recent inhabitants.

If the burden of working for little reward in an isolating society stripped of any overriding purpose can be recognised to have an effect on individuals, how could it not also be said to have an effect on society as a whole? Or to put it the other way around, if enough people in a society are suffering from a form of exhaustion, might it not be that the society they are living in has become exhausted?

What about the Hindus? This thought occurred to me the other night while watching an evening of documentaries about Islam on BBC4. By the end, the viewer was left with the distinct impression that we would all still be living in mud-huts if Muhammad's mother had remained a virgin.... But what this farce of bad TV and worse history did remind me of was that if, say, the Hindu community had only been fortunate enough to produce four young men willing to blow the hell out of Londoners and provided a clerical and political class willing to make excuses for them, then the BBC might credit Hindus with inventing the modern world. The government would be pumping tens of millions of pounds into their community events. Young people would be taught Hindu scriptures with resources from the public purse. The Guardian would be bowing its collective editorial knee before their deities. At Christmas, the most rabidly genocidal Hindu leader available would doubtless broadcast to the nation on Channel 4. When you stand back and look at it, the problem for all the other religions is that they just can't seem to provide the eager young foot-soldiers that Islam can.

Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words – even provocative or repugnant ones – are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.

So it was that Biden ended up choosing Kamala Harris, a senator and former state attorney general who had distinguished herself most in the primaries by attacking him as a racist. On the sole occasion this was raised after she joined the ticket Harris laughed her special laugh. You are lucky if you have not heard this laugh. It is of a type rarely heard outside a penitentiary: a sort of wild, false, exaggerated impersonation of how a human being might laugh. Harris laughs like Mark Zuckerberg moves — as though he has studied these humanoids and is hoping to stay undercover until cyborg D-Day.

The metaphysics that a new generation is imbibing and everyone else is being force-fed has many points of instability, is grounded in a desire to express certainty about things we do not know, and to be wildly dismissive and relativistic about things that we actually do know.