Life at the Bottom Quotes

“IT IS A MISTAKE to suppose that all men, or at least all Englishmen, want to be free. On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it. They would happily exchange their liberty for a modest (if illusory) security.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“I have had the following conversation on innumerable occasions with young men of about 20 who have been unemployed since leaving school, and whose general educational level is outlined above: ‘Have you thought of improving your education?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘There’s no point. There are no jobs.’ ‘Could there be any other reason to get educated?’ ‘No.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“What do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were-poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egalitarian redistribution of wealth-even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass

“This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good about behaving badly.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgmentalism is at best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness? How can people learn from experience unless they are told that they can and should change? One doesn't demand of laboratory mice that they do better: but man is not a mouse, and I can think of no more contemptuous way of treating people than to ascribe to them no more responsibility than such mice.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass

“For example, the number of patients admitted to our ward declined precipitously during the first days of the Gulf War and during the European soccer championships. People were too absorbed for a time in affairs other than their own – albeit by the proxy of television – to contemplate suicide. The boredom of self-absorption is thus one of the promoters of attempted suicide, and being attached to a cardiac monitor for a time or having an intravenous infusion in one’s arm helps to relieve it. I’m treated, therefore I am. Patterns”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“This underclass is not poor, at least by the standards that have prevailed throughout the great majority of human history. It exists, to a varying degree, in all Western societies. Like every other social class, it has benefited enormously from the vast general increase in wealth of the past hundred years. In certain respects, indeed, it enjoys amenities and comforts that would have made a Roman emperor or an absolute monarch gasp. Nor is it politically oppressed: it fears neither to speak its mind nor the midnight knock on the door. Yet its existence is wretched nonetheless, with a special wretchedness that is peculiarly its own.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“Finally, consider the effect that the mass media’s constant rehearsal of injustices has upon the population. People come to believe that, far from being extremely fortunate by the standards of all previously existing populations, we actually live in the worst of times and under the most unjust of dispensations. Every wrongful conviction, every instance of police malfeasance, is so publicised that even professional criminals, even those who have performed appalling deeds, feel on a priori grounds they too must have been unjustly, or at least hypocritically, dealt with.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism – a relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for intellectuals – has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“And if I paint a picture of a way of life that is wholly without charm or merit, and describe many people who are deeply unattractive, it is important to remember that, if blame is to be apportioned, it is the intellectuals who deserve most of it. They should have known better but always preferred to avert their gaze. They considered the purity of their ideas to be more important than the actual consequences of their ideas. I know of no egotism more profound.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“It is the prerogative of the unthinkingly prosperous to sneer at the bourgeois virtues.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass

“If humankind, as T. S. Eliot put it, cannot bear very much reality, it seems that it can bear any amount of unreality.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“Middle-class friends of mine were appalled to discover that the spelling being taught to their daughter in school was frequently wrong; they were even more appalled when they drew it to the attention of the school’s head teacher and were told it did not matter, since the spelling was approximately right and everyone knew anyway what the misspelling meant.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“Linguistic and educational relativism helps to transform a class into a caste – a caste, almost, of Untouchables.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“Just as no one is guilty when everyone is, no one is responsible when everyone is.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“the exercise of liberty requires virtue if it is not to turn into a nightmare.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“If people demand sexual liberty for themselves, but sexual fidelity from others, the result is the inflammation of jealousy, for it is natural to suppose that one is being done by as one is doing to others – and jealousy is the most frequent precipitant of violence between the sexes.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass

“The triumph of the doctrine of the sovereignty of sentiment over sense would have delighted the Romantics, no doubt, but it has promoted an unconscionable amount of misery.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“The complacent disregard by the latter of the social catastrophe wrought in the former appalls me almost as much as the catastrophe itself.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“But the fact that the debased culture of which rap music is a product receives such serious attention and praise deludes its listeners into supposing that nothing finer exists than what they already know and like. Such flattery is thus the death of aspiration, and lack of aspiration is, of course, one of the causes of passivity.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom

“The study of the form is the betting man's philology, philosophy, science, and literary criticism all rolled into one.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass

“every psychic defence mechanism known to the modern psychologist makes its appearance somewhere in Shakespeare.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom