Theodore Dalrymple Quotes (96 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Life at the Bottom

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple: 96 quotes 3 likes

Famous Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

“When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.”

Theodore Dalrymple

What is Poverty? http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_2_oh_to_be.html (Spring 1999).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“The main difference between working in an NHS hospital in Britain and a prison is that prison is much safer.”

Theodore Dalrymple

CBC Ideas Interview (podcast) (September 25, 2006)

“The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.”

Theodore Dalrymple

“Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.”

Theodore Dalrymple

“To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.”

Theodore Dalrymple

“If consequences are removed from enough actions, then the very concept of human agency evaporates, life itself becomes meaningless, and is thenceforth a vacuum in which people oscillate between boredom and oblivion.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

Theodore Dalrymple Quotes about people

“Addicts, to this day, claim that they are they are the only people qualified to speak of the seriousness of withdrawal effects; as if only people with cerebral malaria or bowel cancer could speak of their seriousness.”

Theodore Dalrymple

C-SPAN: Romancing Opiates https://www.c-span.org/video/?191384-1/romancing-opiates (May 30, 2006)

“Even [Marx], whose information about people came mainly from books, must have known that the Manifesto’s depiction of the relations between men and women was grossly distorted. His rage was therefore—as is so much modern rage—entirely synthetic, perhaps an attempt to assume a generosity of spirit, or love of mankind, that he knew he did not have but felt he ought to have”

Theodore Dalrymple

How—and How Not—to Love Mankind.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Frontpage Magazine interview http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19293 (August 31, 2005).

“I’m not actually against, for example, people going into rehabilitation, provided it is understood that this is not really a medical procedure. Often what happens is that people who are addicted to a substance — alcohol or opiates — have comprehensively messed up their lives, and since life is biography and not just a series of unconnected moments, it may be that they require some assistance in getting their lives together. But I don’t regard that as really a medical procedure.”

Theodore Dalrymple

C-SPAN: Romancing Opiates https://www.c-span.org/video/?191384-1/romancing-opiates (May 30, 2006)

“In a democratic age, only the behavior of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Who Killed Childhood?
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“People who are given opiates after operations — sometimes for days — do not become addicts in the sense that I’m talking about. Moreover, it’s been shown that heroin addicts have to make considerable efforts — in other words to be determined — to become addicts, and addicted; and on average it takes them about a year or so. In other words, heroin does not hook them, they hook heroin. And this, I think should suggest, is a typical example of the way that when we think about social problems, or the way many of us think about social problems, we ascribe agency not to agents but to inanimate objects and substances, and forces.”

Theodore Dalrymple

C-SPAN: Romancing Opiates https://www.c-span.org/video/?191384-1/romancing-opiates (May 30, 2006)

Theodore Dalrymple Quotes about life

“There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Addicted to Addicts http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_sndgs01.html (Winter 1999).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press. Spasms of self-righteousness are its substitute for the moral life.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Who Killed Childhood? http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_oh_to_be.html (Spring 2004).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.”

Theodore Dalrymple

A Neglected Genius http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_oh_to_be.html (Winter 2004).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex.”

Theodore Dalrymple

All Sex, All the Time.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People's Study House—all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata—when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, "Do you speak English?"
An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, "Down with Big Brother!"
"Yes," I replied.
"I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life."
It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself.”

Theodore Dalrymple

The Dystopian Imagination http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2001).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“If all our political and intellectual elite offers by way of a national culture is “pop music, gambling, fashionable clothes or television,” then we can neither mount a convincing intellectual defense against our enemies, nor hope to integrate intelligent, inquiring, and unfulfilled Muslim youths—young men principally, of course—to our way of life.”

Theodore Dalrymple

The Cost of Frivolity http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-02-01td.html (February 1, 2007).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Theodore Dalrymple: Trending quotes

“The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men’s souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Engineering Souls http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_sndgs03.html (March 22, 2007).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Men , World , Soul , Change

“The purpose of those who argue for cultural diversity is to impose ideological uniformity.”

Theodore Dalrymple

“When a population feels alienated from the legal system under which it lives, because that system fails to protect it from real dangers while lending succor and encouragement to every possible kind of wrongdoing, the population may well lose faith in the very idea of law. That is how civilization unravels.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Prison Porn http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_sndgs08.html (Winter 2003).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Faith , Law , Feeling , Idea

Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

“Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.”

Theodore Dalrymple book Life at the Bottom

Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001).
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=GR5vAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PR14&ots=YQt2Bn14Ci&dq=%22downward%20cultural%20aspiration%22&pg=PR14#v=onepage&q=%22downward%20cultural%20aspiration%22&f=false Google Books

Music , Fashion , Clothes

“In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple finds a cure for the German malady of low blood pressure: read The Guardian's job advertisements http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001381.php (February 5, 2007).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome.”

Theodore Dalrymple

All Sex, All the Time http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_3_urbanities-all_sex.html (Summer 2000).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Problem , Freedom , Personality

“Over and over again, medical writers liken withdrawal [from heroin], at worst, to a dose of flu. … Let me ask the reader this: if you were given a choice between suffering a bout of flu in the above sense, or avoiding it by robbing someone in the street or breaking into a house and stealing its contents, which would you choose?”

Theodore Dalrymple

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

Sense , Suffering , Housing

“It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.”

Theodore Dalrymple

A Confusion of Tongues http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_otbie-immigrant_assimilation.html (Spring 2008).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Leveling Britain http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-03-22td.html (March 22, 2007).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Psychiatric drug promotion and the politics of neoliberalism: The British Journal of Psychiatry is wrong to blame neoliberalism for the over-prescription of antidepressants http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000941.php (May 24, 2006).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

Age

“The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Seeing Is Not Believing http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2000).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Reality

“Loose language suggests loose thought.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Victim impact statements represent the sentimentalisation - the Diana-ification - of the criminal justice system, argues Theodore Dalrymple http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001298.php (December 11, 2006).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“Political abstractions can disguise or change the meaning of the most elementary realities.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Gillray’s Ungloomy Morality http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_1_oh_to_be.html (Winter 2002).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Reality , Change

“Orwell's 1984 refers more directly to contemporary events than does Huxley's book: the narrative takes place in the near rather than the distant future and obviously sets its sights on Stalinism. When I traveled in the communist world before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found that everyone I met who had read the book (clandestinely, of course) expressed immeasurable admiration for it and marveled that a man who had never set foot inside a communist country could not only describe the physical environment so well—the universal smell of cabbage, the grayness of the dilapidated buildings—but also its mental and moral atmosphere. It was almost as if the communist regimes had taken 1984 as a blueprint rather than as a warning.”

Theodore Dalrymple

The Dystopian Imagination http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2001).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Books , World , Travel , Universe

“Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Why Theo Van Gogh Was Murdered http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_11_15_04td.html (November 15, 2004).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

World , Hope , Reality

“Frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness—a most unattractive combination.”

Theodore Dalrymple

It’s This Bad http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_oh_to_be.html(Spring 2006).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion.”

Theodore Dalrymple

"Tax is solidarity" - Theodore Dalrymple diagnoses France's malaise: Their intellectuals' belief that tax is solidarity and justice is fairness - but the national sport is tax evasion http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001407.php (February 28, 2007).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

Sport

“It seems that when an impending catastrophe will affect them personally, in their very flesh and blood, intellectuals start to think more clearly about the legal and institutional prerequisites of a free society.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Ideas That Kill http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_diarist.html (Winter 2000).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Thinking , Personality

“Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one’s own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience.”

Theodore Dalrymple

How PC Boosts Le Pen http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_4_25_02td.html (April 25, 2002).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

History , Parting

“If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Addiction and the Ipswich Murders: Theodore Dalrymple argues that the five murdered women were driven on to the streets not by addiction itself, but by myths about addiction http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001306.php (December 14, 2006).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“Resentment is one of the few emotions that never lets you down, but it’s useless. In fact, it’s worse than useless, it’s harmful, and we all suffer from it at some time in our lives.”

Theodore Dalrymple

CBC Ideas Interview (podcast) (September 25, 2006)

Suffering , Time

“Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism.”

Theodore Dalrymple

It is the inescapable duty of every decent citizen to express no interest in or enthusiasm for football and the World Cup http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000966.php (June 7, 2006).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

War , Truth

“For intellectuals, everyone’s mind is closed but their own.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Les intellos Speak http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_11_10_04td.html (November 10, 2004).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“14:06> …Of course I made it quite clear to the women that I thought that that the way that they had been abused was terrible and completely unjustifiable. However, I thought that it was very important that they should understand their own complicity in it; so that, for example, they understood that the way they chose men, and their refusal to see signs (which they were capable of seeing) resulted in their misery… <14:40> To give you a concrete example, I would say to them, ‘This man of yours, who’s very nasty to you, and drags you across the floor, and puts your head through the window, and sometimes even hangs you out of the window by your ankles: How long do you think it would take me to realise he was no good, as he came through the door? Would it take me a second, or half a second, or an eighth of a second, or would I not notice that there was anything wrong with him at all?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, an eighth of a second, you’d know immediately.’ And I would say to them, ‘Well, if you know that I would know immediately, then you knew immediately as well.’ It’s a logical consequence, really. And they would accept that. ‘And yet, you chose to associate with him, knowing full well that he was no good; and I tell you this, because it’s very necessary you should understand your own part in the predicament you now find yourself in, because if you don’t understand it, or don’t think about it, you’re just going to repeat it.’ which is of course, a very, very common pattern.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Daniels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Daniels_(psychiatrist) on helping victims of abuse understand how they can help to break the cycle.
CBC Ideas Interview (podcast) (September 25, 2006)

Women , Men , Way , Understanding

“The real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: “How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?””

Theodore Dalrymple

The Starving Criminal http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2002).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Question , Problem , Appearance

“When the cold war ended, I thought, as no doubt did many others, that the age of ideology was over. Again like many others, I underestimated man’s need for transcendence, which, in the absence of religion or high culture, he is most likely to find in a political or social cause.”

Theodore Dalrymple

City Journal (1998 - 2008)

War , Age , Religion

“Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.”

Theodore Dalrymple

The Rage of Virginia Woolf http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_3_oh_to_be.html (Summer 2002).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Failure

“Equality can only be measured by outcome: and this means the imposition of racial quotas. The job of the Senior Executive is therefore to be a senior racist.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple finds a cure for the German malady of low blood pressure: read The Guardian's job advertisements.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Policeman in Wonderland http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_2_oh_to_be.html (Spring 2000).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

World , Justice

“The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty.”

Theodore Dalrymple

The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

People , Law

“There is no such thing, wrote Oscar Wilde, as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. Presumably, then, Mein Kampf would have been all right had it been better written.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Trash, Violence, and Versace: But Is It Art? http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html (Winter 1998).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Books

“Modernity is the most transient of qualities.”

Theodore Dalrymple

The aesthetics of the A55: Theodore Dalrymple finds that everything built along the A55 since the First World War has been a scar on the landscape and explores why our architecture has been so bad http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000937.php (May 22, 2006).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“There is nothing an official hates more than a person who makes up his own mind.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

Hate , Personality

“And the fact is that millions of opiates addicts having given up their habit without medical assistance.”

Theodore Dalrymple

C-SPAN: Romancing Opiates https://www.c-span.org/video/?191384-1/romancing-opiates (May 30, 2006)

“The refusal of free inquiry derives from an awareness of the fragility of the basis of religious faith; and since certainty is psychologically preferable to truth, the former often being willfully mistaken for the latter, anything that threatens certainty is anathematized with fury.”

Theodore Dalrymple

The Terrorists Among Us http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_urbanities-terrorists.html (Summer 2006).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Truth , Faith

“Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.”

Theodore Dalrymple

All Sex, All the Time.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Idea

“To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute.”

Theodore Dalrymple

An imaginary “scandal” http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/may05/dalrymple.htm (May 2005).
New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

Courage , Problem , Reality

“Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Mr Brown's self-esteem issue - or, asks Theodore Dalrymple, does Gordon Brown really believe that he can solve the problems of the world? http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001326.php (January 24, 2007).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

Children , School

“Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result.”

Theodore Dalrymple

The Dystopian Imagination http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2001).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Fear , Dreams , Hope

“It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilized—that men become fully human.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Sex and the Shakespeare Reader http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2003).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Men , Learning

“The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Obsessive gambling is now regarded as a mental illness - but, argues Theodore Dalrymple, does that not mean that the Disability Discrimination Act makes it illegal for bookies to discriminate against obsessive gamblers by banning them from their shops? http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001721.php (February 19, 2008).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“Compassionate fellow-feeling … can soon become self-indulgent and lead to spiritual pride. It imparts an inner glow, like a shot of whiskey on a cold day, but like whisky it can prevent the clear-headedness which we need at least as much as we need warmth of heart.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Migration: Multiculturalism and its Metaphors (2016)

Feeling , Heart

“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.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple is outraged to be asked his ethnicity by officialdom - but remembers that it is our social duty to grin and bear insults http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001697.php (January 23, 2008).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)