92 Quotes by Theodore Dalrymple

Shakespeare knows that the tension between men as they are and men as they ought to be will forever remain unresolved. Man’s imperfectability is no more an excuse for total permissiveness, however, than are man’s imperfections a reason for inflexible intolerance.

No one seems to have noticed that a loss of a sense of shame means a loss of privacy; a loss of privacy means a loss of intimacy; and a loss of intimacy means a loss of depth. 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.

To base one’s rejection of what exists – and hence one’s prescription for a better world – upon the petty frustrations of one’s youth, as surely many middle-class radicals have done, is profoundly egotistical. Unless consciously rejected, this impulse leads to a tendency throughout life to judge the rightness or wrongness of policies by one’s personal emotional response to them, as if emotion were an infallible guide.

In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.

Multiculturalism rests on the supposition – or better, the dishonest pretense – that all cultures are equal and that no fundamental conflict can arise between the customs, mores, and philosophical outlooks of two different cultures.

The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.

Behaviorism entails the systematic denial of meaning, a denial which does violence to both the evidence and the everyday experience of humanity.

Under communism all minorities dance.

Zweig would have dismissed our modern emotional incontinence as a sign not of honesty but of an increasing inability or unwillingness truly to feel.