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Theodore Dalrymple: 192 quotes3 likes

“Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life.”

Theodore Dalrymple

What We Have To Lose http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_what_we_have.html (Autumn 2001). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy.”

Theodore Dalrymple

British Medical Journal Views and Reviews: Desperate house calls (BMJ 2009;338:b212).

“Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it.”

Theodore Dalrymple

The Economist Sees No Evil http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_2_20_02td.html (February 20, 2002). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“The victory over cruelty is never final, but, like the maintenance of freedom, requires eternal vigilance.”

Theodore Dalrymple

How—and How Not—to Love Mankind http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_3_urbanities-how_and_how_no.html (Summer 2001). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Frontpage Magazine interview (August 31, 2005).

“It is, of course, a common prejudice that censorship is bad for art and therefore always unjustified: though, if this were so, mankind would have little in the way of an artistic heritage and we should now be living in an artistic golden age.”

Theodore Dalrymple

What’s Wrong with Twinkling Buttocks? http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_oh_to_be.html (Summer 2003). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Henceforth there are to be no fixed or inviolable principles of law at all—only an endlessly changing legal response to the fashionable causes of the moment.”

Theodore Dalrymple

All Our Pomp of Yesterday http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_3_oh_to_be.html (Summer 1999). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“In Britain, journalists often view comparisons with our society going back two, three, or seven centuries as more relevant than comparisons going back two, three, or seven decades. Drunkenness centuries ago is more illuminating than comparative sobriety 30 years ago. The distant past, selectively mined for evidence that justifies our current conduct, becomes more important than living memory.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Selective Memory http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_07_06_04td.html (July 6, 2004). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Experience rarely teaches its lessons directly but instead requires interpretation through the filter of preconceived theories, prejudices, and desires. Where these are invincible, facts are weak things.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Less Liberté Means Less Egalité http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_sndgs05.html (Winter 2006). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of sleepwalkers.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Seeing Is Not Believing.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Exposing Shallowness http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/demello-dalrymple-2647 (June 2000). New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

“We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Modern Predestination http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-02-06td.html (February 6, 2007). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

“Whereas fortitude was once regarded as a virtue, it has come to be regarded as a kind of reprehensible and deliberate obtuseness, to be utterly condemned as treason to the self (there is no fury like a non-judgmentalist scorned).”

Theodore Dalrymple

Bad counsel http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/jun05/therap.htm (June 2005). New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

“It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind.”

Theodore Dalrymple

It is right to imprison drug addicts - argues Theodore Dalrymple http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001744.php (March 18, 2008). The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“Henceforth, virtue was not the exercise of discipline, self-control or benevolence for the sake of others, but the expression of the right opinions of the moment.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Good people have become a defeated class in Blair's Britain, argues Theodore Dalrymple http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001464.php (March 29, 2007). The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple on Terence Rattigan, Suicide and Prison - or how incontinent compassion has become a Keynesian stimulus to the economy of the caring profession http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001768.php (April 18, 2008). The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“If a lack of money had prevented people from improving their lot, then mankind would still be living in the caves: unless you believe that investment capital first arrived from outer space.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple remembers Ken Saro-Wiwa - and asks, if unearned income from oil has done so much harm to Nigeria, will increased unearned aid flows not do similar harm to Africa as a whole? http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000708.php (January 3, 2006). The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 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)

“Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles.”

Theodore Dalrymple

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

“The withdrawal symptoms from opiates are not severe and never dangerous, though of course they do exist. Insofar as they are genuinely feared, there has been a campaign of exaggeration about them for nearly 200 years.”

Theodore Dalrymple

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