“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
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained. — Theodore Dalrymple Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
