Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism. - Theodore Dalrymple

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.

It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow.

With carefully nourished resentment, a man can go through his life blaming someone or something else for his failures. This enables him to be a failure and to feel morally superior to the world at the same time.