List of Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

Life Is A Biography, Not A Series Of Disconnected Moments, More Or Less Pleasurable But Increasingly Tedious And Unsatisfying Unless One Imposes A Purposive Pattern Upon Them.

The Idea That Man Is A Tabula Rasa, Or Mao's Sheet Of Blank Paper Upon Which The Most Beautiful Characters Can Be Written, Is An Old One With Disastrous Implications. I Do Not Think Though That The Cults You Mention Could Survive Honest Thought About Human Nature.

Childhood In Large Parts Of Modern Britain, At Any Rate, Has Been Replaced By Premature Adulthood, Or Rather Adolescence. Children Grow Up Very Fast But Not Very Far. That Is Why It Is Possible For 14 Year Olds Now To Establish Friendships With 26 Year Olds - Because They Know By The Age Of 14 All They Are Ever Going To Know.

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.

Obesity Is The Result Of A Loss Of Self-control. Indeed, Loss Of Self-control Might Be Said To Be The Defining Social (or Anti-social) Characteristic Of Our Age: Public Drunkenness, Excessive Gambling, Promiscuity And Common-or-garden Rudeness Are All Examples Of Our Collective Loss Of Self-control.

How Many People Does Each Of Us Know Who Claim To Seek Happiness But Freely Choose Paths Inevitably Leading To Misery?

Orders Can Be Benign Or Malign, But The Habit Of Obeying Them Can Become Ingrained.

There Is Nothing That An Intellectual Less Likes To Change Than His Mind, Or A Politician His Policy.

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.

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.

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.

Do I Grow Cleverer With Age, Or Does The World Grow More Stupid?