Theodore Dalrymple: Humanity

“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)

Life , People

“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)

“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

“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

“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)

“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).

Disappointment , Optimism , Reality , Parent

“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)

Life , People , Pleasure , Communication

“Humor, fearlessness, seriousness, and honesty: the qualities that are hated with an equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies that are contending for tenure in the humanities departments of our universities.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Migration: Multiculturalism and its Metaphors (2016)

Hate , Universe