Theodore Dalrymple: I've heard a hundred different variations of insta...

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 resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

Theodore Dalrymple

liars lying people

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

Theodore Dalrymple

gratitude rights justice

Nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that . . . everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.

Theodore Dalrymple

doctrine mind men

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

Theodore Dalrymple

moral taken people

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

Theodore Dalrymple

vices evil may

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

Theodore Dalrymple

feel-good important feelings

The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.

Theodore Dalrymple

heroism struggle humble

The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.

Theodore Dalrymple

religious loss men

So what exactly are the rewards of resentment. It is always a relief to know that the reason we have failed in life is not because we lack the talent, energy, or determination to succeed, but because of a factor that is beyond our control and that has loaded the dice decisively against us.

Theodore Dalrymple

dice succeed determination

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

Theodore Dalrymple

ingenuity century way

Considering the importance of resentment in our lives, and the damage it does, it receives scant attention from psychiatrists and psychologists. Resentment is a great rationalizer: it presents us with selected versions of our own past, so that we do not recognize our own mistakes and avoid the necessity to make painful choices.

Theodore Dalrymple

choices mistake past

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 their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems.

Theodore Dalrymple

class character men

There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.

Theodore Dalrymple

weight decision responsibility

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

Theodore Dalrymple

when-things-go-wrong aim pay

Equality of Ugliness: If we can't all live in a beautiful place we must all live in an ugly place.

Theodore Dalrymple

ugly ifs beautiful

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.

Theodore Dalrymple

misery vices people

In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost." But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.

Theodore Dalrymple

wife stupid war

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

Theodore Dalrymple

stupid age america

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Theodore Dalrymple

likes intellectual mind

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

Theodore Dalrymple

path doe people

I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties--feminism and multi-culturalism--come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.