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Douglas Murray Quotes

Douglas Murray is a British author and political commentator. He founded the Centre for Social Cohesion in 2007, which became part of the Henry Jackson Society, where he was associate director from 2011 to 2018. He is currently an associate editor of the conservative British political and cultural magazine The Spectator.Murray is known for his criticism of immigration and Islam. His books include Neoconservatism: Why We Need It , The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam , The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity and The War on the West .

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Sohrab Ahmari have praised Murray's work and writing on Islam in Europe. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has said of Murray, "Whether one agrees with him or not" he is "one of the most important public intellectuals today." Critics claim his views and ideology are linked to far-right political ideologies, and accuse him of promoting far-right conspiracy theories such as the Eurabia, the Great Replacement, and Cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.



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✵ 16. July 1979
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Douglas Murray: 18   quotes 11   likes

Famous Douglas Murray Quotes

“A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future.”

Douglas Murray

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

“For even if you believe - as most people do - that some immigration is a good thing and makes a country a more interesting place, it does not follow that the more immigration the better. Nor does it mean - however many upsides there are - that there are not downsides which should be equally easy to state without accusations of malice. For mass immigration does not continue bringing the same level of benefits to a society the more people who come in.”

Douglas Murray

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

“The desire to continue to feel yourself guilty arguably finds its endpoint in modern European liberal societies: the first societies in human history who, when they are hit, ask what they did to deserve it. Unassuageable historical guilt carries over into the present.”

Douglas Murray

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

“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.”

Douglas Murray

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

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

Douglas Murray

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

“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?”

Douglas Murray

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

Douglas Murray Quotes about people

“More than any other continent or culture in the world today, Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past. Alongside this outgoing version of self-distrust runs a more introverted version of the same guilt. For there is also the problem in Europe of an existential tiredness and a feeling that perhaps for Europe the story has run out and a new story must be allowed to begin. Mass immigration — the replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people — is one way in which this new story has been imagined: a change, we seemed to think, was as good as a rest. Such existential civilizational tiredness is not a uniquely modern-European phenomenon, but the fact that a society should feel like it has run out of steam at precisely the moment when a new society has begun to move in cannot help but lead to vast, epochal changes.”

Douglas Murray

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

“Political debate can barely occur in an atmosphere in which people assume words and terms to have distinctly different meanings. They slide, slip and decay. But in the world we are in – where anybody might edit a Wikipedia definition, and where plenty of people are learning on the hoof about complex and disputed ideas – we need to try to agree on what words mean rather than define them for ourselves.”

Douglas Murray

"Is cultural Marxism a myth?" https://unherd.com/2019/03/is-cultural-marxism-a-myth/, Unherd, March 29, 2019

“Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orientating ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centres of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and intersectionality is a waste of a life.”

Douglas Murray

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019)

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.”

Douglas Murray

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

World , Way

“Campaign groups which used to oppose neo-Nazis realized that there weren’t sufficient Nazis to justify their business models. They decided that, henceforth, attacking parties such as Ukip should also come under their anti-fascist remit. Soon anybody who opposed supranational institutions or sought to restrict immigration found themselves labelled as beyond the pale. It meant that the views of the majority of the public — in Britain and elsewhere — effectively became defined as far right. In recent years this terminological mission-creep has morphed from being annoying to being disturbing. For if everybody is a fascist, then nobody is. And anyone who knows the scene across Europe will understand that we may well have need of these terms.”

Douglas Murray

Source: "Right from wrong: a guide to the new European politics" https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/right-from-wrong-a-guide-to-the-new-european-politics/, The Spectator, August 17, 2019

Business , Understanding

“Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilisation was commonplace. Today, it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to do it.”

Douglas Murray

The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason (2022)

History , Universe

“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.”

Douglas Murray

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019)

“Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing – possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at, and say ‘What the hell were they thinking?’”

Douglas Murray

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019)

Hell , Time , Thinking , Age

“… we have begun trying to reorder our societies not in line with facts we know from science but based on political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences.”

Douglas Murray

Source: The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019)

Science

“If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.”

Douglas Murray

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019)

Sex

“A society that says we are defined exclusively by the bar and the nightclub, by self-indulgence and our sense of entitlement, cannot be said to have deep roots or much likelihood of survival. But a society which holds that our culture consists of the cathedral, the playhouse and the playing field, the shopping mall and Shakespeare, has a chance.”

Douglas Murray book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

Sense , Self-confidence , Chance

“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.”

Douglas Murray

Source: The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019)

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