“Custine described them as ‘automata inconvenienced with a soul’: a description true, perhaps, of all bureaucrats fearful for their jobs but truest of all where power is both arbitrary and completely centralised, as it was in Russia.” — Theodore Dalrymple Copy Share Image
“Such bureaucrats can neither be hurried in their deliberations nor made to see common sense. Indeed, the very absurdity or pedantry of these deliberations is for them the guarantee of their own fair-mindedness, impartiality, and disinterest. To treat all people… — Theodore Dalrymple Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained. — Theodore Dalrymple Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
