Theodore Dalrymple

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

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

— 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…

— Theodore Dalrymple

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

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Theodore Dalrymple

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

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

— 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…

— Theodore Dalrymple

Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.

— Theodore Dalrymple

“Behaviorism was but one instance of a terrible temptation for all intellectuals, namely that of nothing-but-ism. History is nothing but the clash…

— Theodore Dalrymple

“Flea markets are also now legal in Cuba, and a petty trade in cast-off clothing and household goods takes place. Twelve years…

— Theodore Dalrymple

“the knowledge, tastes, and social accomplishments of 13-year-olds are often the same as those of 28-year-olds. Adolescents are precociously adult; adults are…

— Theodore Dalrymple

“And accordingly, the adolescent sensibility is one that prevails in much of the art world, where the most adolescent of goals, transgression,…

— Theodore Dalrymple

How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?

— Theodore Dalrymple

“The study of the form is the betting man's philology, philosophy, science, and literary criticism all rolled into one.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

— Theodore Dalrymple

“argued, with the inventive cunning that each of us possesses when a pet theory of ours is refuted by the evidence,”

— Theodore Dalrymple

“it is widely believed that the purpose of art is to challenge, to question, to transgress, never to celebrate, to harmonise, to…

— Theodore Dalrymple