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)

Life , Way , Decision

“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

“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)

Life , Feeling

“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)

Life , Sex , Falseness , Happiness

“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)

Life , People , Alcohol

“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)

Life

“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)

Life , Men

“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)

Life , Men , Youth , Hope

“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

“With carefully nourished resentment, a man can go through his life blaming someone or something else for his failures. This enables him to be a failure and to feel morally superior to the world at the same time.”

Theodore Dalrymple

Source: "Private Clubs and the Sour Pleasures of Resentment" https://www.theepochtimes.com/private-clubs-and-the-sour-pleasures-of-resentment_3956322.html, The Epoch Times (August 19, 2021).

World , Failure , Time , Life