John Derbyshire Quotes

Stereotypes are, in fact, merely one aspect of the mind’s ability to make generalizations, without which science and mathematics, not to mention much of everyday life, would be impossible.

Nonmathematical people sometimes ask me, “You know math, huh? Tell me something I’ve always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?” I can only reply, “The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of ‘infinity’ as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, 'What is truth divided by beauty?’ I have no clue. I only know how to divide numbers. ‘Infinity,’ ‘truth,’ ‘beauty’—those are not numbers.”

Western culture is in its twilight; there is a dark age ahead; and while college-humanities fads and "secular-progressive values" have certainly done much damage, they are symptoms, not causes - fragments of junk sucked into a vacuum. The fundamental reason why so much of our culture is shit - either literally, like Signor Manzoni's masterwork, or figuratively - is exhaustion, cultural exhaustion.

Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt.

Historians of the future will amuse themselves by coming up with theories to explain why European civilization, at the height of its powers, rich with unparalleled achievements in science, music, art, literature, mathematics, and technology, gave up its lands and its treasures to people for whom those achievements were mere hated tokens of oppression or the impious and superfluous productions of infidels.

We are a rugged species, up for anything the universe can throw at us; and as the great gloominaries knew, we will be immeasurably better prepared for nasty surprises if we approach the universe realistically - pessimistically - than if we continue to peer out at our surroundings through a distorting, rose-colored prism of wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Universal-suffrage democracy may have been a good idea 120 years ago, when most adults did productive work into their sixties, then died. In today’s top-heavy welfare states, it just empowers tax-eaters to loot the national wealth.

Once this was a nation of farmers, builders, inventors, creators, explorers, and thinkers. Now we are a nation of bubblehead academic poseurs, race-guilt hucksters, and keening middle-class "victims" of imaginary wrongs.

American society is increasingly a conspiracy of the smart against the dumb.

After the many hundreds of generations that Australian, East Asian, African, European and indigenous American populations of Homo sapians developed in isolation from each other, in different environments, there ought to be divergence aplenty, though nowhere near to speciation. And so there is. That is why a roomful of Australian aborigines looks nothing like a roomful of Hungarians, and neither looks anything like a roomful of Quechua-speaking South American indigenes.

Pop culture is filth. It is now completely degenerate. Why do you never hear anyone humming a current pop song any more? Because none of them is hummable, or even worth bothering to remember. What is the main topic on TV sitcoms and "dramedies"? You know what. Why do you stand in the aisle in Blockbuster muttering to yourself: "There isn't a single damn movie in here I want to watch"? Because Hollywood produces nothing but crap, crap, crap.

The happy talkers tell us that diversity is a boon, making our society stronger and better. Our own lying eyes tell us that it is the source of continual trouble; not merely the solitary "hunkering down" that Robert Putnam discovered, but rancor, disorder, litigation, and violence.

Unbelievers may think - all right, we do think - Christianity is only slightly less nutty than Islam; but Christianity is ours. We've got along with it for several centuries; and the relationship between Western unbelievers and Western Christians, if not always polite, is stable and comfortable. Can we fit Islam in like that?

All religions look wacky to an unbeliever, even to one who does not, like the celebrity atheists, consider religion a menace. Islam, in its present frustrated state, is doing more harm than most, but that's historically contingent.

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias.