a being as dependent on his cultural inheritance as man…

Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive…

— Theodore Dalrymple

Many young people now end a discussion with the supposedly definitive and unanswerable statement that such is their opinion, and their opinion is just…

— Theodore Dalrymple

“even received a few requests that I send medicine, since none was available in the local pharmacies—an admission, unthinkable a few years ago, that…

— Theodore Dalrymple

There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the…

— Theodore Dalrymple

“pride must be in the work, not the person.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

“In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarks that Shakespeare’s evildoers, Macbeth notably among them, stop short at a mere dozen corpses because…

— Theodore Dalrymple

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

— Theodore Dalrymple

“A taste for kitsch among the well-to-do is a sign of spiritual impoverishment; but among the poor, it represents a striving for beauty, an…

— Theodore Dalrymple

“Facts are much more malleable than prejudices.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda…

— Theodore Dalrymple

“People with no experience of life except under communist regimes would tell me that they knew—though they were unsure how—that their life was not…

— Theodore Dalrymple

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to…

— Theodore Dalrymple

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic,…

— Theodore Dalrymple

“The young man regained consciousness in the ambulance, but his mother insisted that he give no evidence to the police because, had he done…

— Theodore Dalrymple

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities…

— Theodore Dalrymple