“Metaphysics, said the late nineteenth-century idealist philosopher Bradley, is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct; but metaphysics has changed in the meantime, and is now the finding of bad reasons for what we cannot possibly… — Theodore Dalrymple Copy Share
Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by… — Theodore Dalrymple Copy Share
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 was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most… — 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 ‘natural,’ just as Winston Smith concludes that life in Airstrip One (the new name for England in 1984) was unnatural. Other ways of life might have their problems, my Albanian and Rumanian friends would say, but… — 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 repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to… — Theodore Dalrymple Copy Share
