Our Culture, What's Left of It Quotes

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph, said Burke, is for good men to do nothing; and most good men nowadays can be relied upon to do precisely that. 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, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“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, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“[T]he scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“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 of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“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 they have no ideology.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“It goes without saying that the artists sympathised not with the actual working classes but with their own idea of the working classes,”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham's law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“The consumption of drugs has the effect of reducing men's freedom by circumscribing the range of their interests. It impairs their ability to pursue more important human aims, such as raising a family and fulfilling civic obligations. Very often it impairs their ability to pursue gainful employment and promotes parasitism. Moreover, far from being expanders of consciousness, most drugs severely limit it. One of the most striking characteristics of drug-takers is their intense and tedious self-absorption.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“Like all pacifists, Zweig evaded the question of how to protect the peaceful sheep from the ravening wolves, no doubt in the unrealistic hope that the wolves would one day discover the advantages of vegetarianism.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“No one seems to have noticed that a loss of a sense of shame means a loss of privacy; a loss of privacy means a loss of intimacy; and a loss of intimacy means a loss of depth. There is, in fact, no better way to produce shallow and superficial people than to let them live their lives entirely in the open, without concealment of anything.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“In the psychotherapeutic worldview to which all good liberals subscribe, there is no evil, only victimhood. The robber and the robbed, the murderer and the murdered, are alike the victims of circumstance, united by the events that overtook them. Future generations (I hope) will find it curious how, in the century of Stalin and Hitler, we have been so eager to deny man's capacity for evil.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“No man was more sensitive than Zweig to the destructive effects upon individual liberty of the demands of large or strident collectivities. He would have viewed with horror the cacophony of monomanias—sexual, racial, social, egalitarian—that marks the intellectual life of our societies, each monomaniac demanding legislative restriction on the freedom of others in the name of a supposed greater, collective good.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“If the war against drugs is lost, then so are the wars against theft, speeding, incest, fraud, rape, murder, arson, and illegal parking. Few, if any, such wars are winnable. So let us all do anything we choose.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called ‘the two greatest gifts of God—the soul and the speech which communicates it.’ People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“Original sin—that is to say, the sin of having been born with human nature that contains within it the temptation to evil—will always make a mockery of attempts at perfection based upon manipulation of the environment.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“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.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“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, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“It is precisely the envelopment of sex (and all other natural functions) with an aura of deeper meaning that makes man human and distinguishes him from the rest of animate nature. To remove that meaning, to reduce sex to biology, as all the sexual revolutionaries did in practice, is to return man to a level of primitive behavior of which we have no record in human history. All animals have sex, but only man makes love.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“The only permissible judgment in polite society is that no judgment is permissible. A century-long reaction against Victorian prudery, repression, and hypocrisy, led by intellectuals who mistook their personal problems for those of society as a whole, has created this confusion. It is as though these intellectuals were constantly on the run from their stern, unbending, and joyless forefathers—and as if they took as an unfailing guide to wise conduct either the opposite of what their forefathers said and did, or what would have caused them most offence, had they been able even to conceive of the possibility of such conduct.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“Restraints upon our natural inclinations, which left to themselves do not automatically lead us to do what is good for us and often indeed lead us to evil, are not only necessary; they are the indispensable condition of civilized existence.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“I learned early in my life that if people were offered the opportunity of tranquility, they often reject it and choose torment instead.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“It is not surprising that emotion untutored by thought results in nearly contentless blather, in which--ironically enough--genuine emotion cannot be adequately expressed.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“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 with equal contempt and indifference is the bureaucrat’s idea of equity.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“Shakespeare knows that the tension between men as they are and men as they ought to be will forever remain unresolved. Man's imperfectability is no more an excuse for total permissiveness, however, than are man's imperfections a reason for inflexible intolerance.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“If it was difficult for a visitor to find anything to eat impromptu in Moscow, Havana, Tirana, Bucharest, or Pyongyang, it took little effort to understand the connection of this difficulty with the vulgar anti-commercialism of Saint Karl and Saint Vladimir. Indeed, it would have taken all the ingenuity of the cleverest academics not to have understood it.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“Where two pieties—feminism and multiculturalism—come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left Of It

“The extreme intellectual elegance of the proposal to legalize the distribution and consumption of drugs, touted as the solution to so many problems at once (AIDS, crime, overcrowding in the prisons, and even the attractiveness of drugs to foolish young people) should give rise to skepticism. Social problems are not usually like that. Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would legalize drugs, are false and inexact: it is one thing to attempt to ban a substance that has been in customary use for centuries by at least nine-tenths of the adult population, and quite another to retain a ban on substances that are still not in customary use, in an attempt to ensure that they never do become customary. Surely we have already slid down enough slippery slopes in the last thirty years without looking for more such slopes to slide down.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“It is only the sentimentalist who imagines that the profundity of a person's response to tragedy is proportional to the length, volume, or shrillness of his lamentation.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses