92 Quotes by Theodore Dalrymple

There is, in fact, no better way to produce shallow and superficial people than to let them live their lives entirely in the open, without concealment of anything.

Political correctness is the means by which we try to control others; decency is the means by which we try to control ourselves.

Political correctness is often the attempt to make sentimentality socially obligatory or legally enforceable.

How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?

One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao’s sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

I have had the following conversation on innumerable occasions with young men of about 20 who have been unemployed since leaving school, and whose general educational level is outlined above: ‘Have you thought of improving your education?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘There’s no point. There are no jobs.’ ‘Could there be any other reason to get educated?’ ‘No.

As the Habsburg military used to say, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.