Top 50 Douglas Murray Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Charles Martel’s victory at the Battle of Tours in 732 is recognised for having prevented the spread of Islam throughout Europe.”

— Douglas Murray

2. “Algerian President Houari Boumedienne who in 1974 told the General Assembly of the United Nations, ‘One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.”

— Douglas Murray

3. “There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here. For of course people only think that they would have acted better in history because they know how history ended up. People in history didn’t – and don’t – have that luxury. They made good or bad choices in the times and places they were in, given the situations and shibboleths that they found themselves with.”

— Douglas Murray

4. “If two people are in disagreement about something important, they may disagree as amicably as they like if it is just a matter of getting to the truth or the most amenable option. But if one party finds their whole purpose in life to reside in some aspect of that disagreement, then the chances of amicability fade fast and the likelihood of reaching any truth recedes.”

— Douglas Murray

5. “Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something. A theoretical physicist like Sheldon Lee Glashow cannot afford to write in the unreadable prose of the social sciences. He needs to communicate exceptionally complex truths in as simple and clear a language as possible.”

— Douglas Murray

6. “By 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for Isis than for the British armed forces.”

— Douglas Murray

7. “To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness.”

— Douglas Murray

8. “Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words – even provocative or repugnant ones – are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.”

— Douglas Murray

9. “It is wholly unsurprising that studies show an increase in anxiety, depression and mental illness in young people today. Rather than being a demonstration of ‘snowflake’-ism it is a wholly understandable reaction to a world whose complexities have squared in their lifetimes. A perfectly reasonable response to a society propelled by tools that can provide endless problems but no answers.”

— Douglas Murray

10. “If you do not respect my past, then why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my culture, then why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my forebears, then why should I respect yours? And if you do not like what my society has produced, then why should I agree to your having a place in it?”

— Douglas Murray

11. “To her audience in Boston she also explained how white people who see people as individuals rather than by their skin colour are in fact ‘dangerous’.70 Meaning that it took only half a century for Martin Luther King’s vision to be exactly inverted.”

— Douglas Murray

12. “Bret Weinstein.”

— Douglas Murray

13. “The dreams of communism and socialism were the sincerest attempts of their day to come up with and put into practice a theory of everything. The endless writings and pamphlets and evangelism in every country of Europe were one more attempt to dream a meaningful dream, capable of solving everything and addressing the problems of everyone. It was, as T. S. Eliot memorably described it, an effort at ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.”

— Douglas Murray

14. “All around us we have the wreckage – metaphorical and real – of all our dreams, our religions, our political ideologies and a thousand other aspirations, all of which in their turn have proved false. And though we have no more illusions or ambitions left, yet we are still here. So what do we do?”

— Douglas Murray

15. “To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness. Was the sum of European endeavour and achievement really meant to culminate in this?”

— Douglas Murray

16. “If there was a genuine chance of diminishing racism, sexism or anti-gay sentiment, who would not wish to seize it with every tool and engine at their disposal? The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal.”

— Douglas Murray

17. “The further Fascism receded into history and the fewer visible fascists there were on display, the more self-proclaimed anti-fascists needed fascism to retain any semblance of political virtue or purpose. It proved politically useful to describe as fascist people who were not Fascists, just as it proved politically useful to describe as racist people who were not racists.”

— Douglas Murray

18. “But if the views of some migrant communities on homosexuality were only a couple of generations out of date, the views of portions of those communities on the subject of women were shown to be out of date by many centuries, at least.”

— Douglas Murray

19. “A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible. The less that was successfully said, the greater the relief and acclaim. No attempt to address any idea, history or fact was able to pass without first being put through the pit-stop of the modern academy. No generality could be attempted and no specific could be uttered.”

— Douglas Murray

20. “Only Europeans and their descendants remember guilt. So only Europeans and their descendants have continuously to atone for it.”

— Douglas Murray

21. “A society that says we are defined exclusively by the bar and the nightclub, by self-indulgence and our sense of entitlement, cannot be said to have deep roots or much likelihood of survival. But, a society which holds that our culture consists of the cathedral, the playhouse and the playing field, the shopping mall and Shakespeare, has a chance.”

— Douglas Murray

22. “A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future.”

— Douglas Murray

23. “The Bible had at best become like the work of Ovid or Homer: containing great truth, but not itself true.”

— Douglas Murray

24. “People began to talk of “equality,” but they did not seem to care about equal rights. They talked of “anti-racism,” but they sounded deeply racist. They spoke of “justice,” but they seemed to mean “revenge.” It.”

— Douglas Murray

25. “There are many attitudes that we all take in our lives, some of which dominate at one point in our lives and recede in another. But a life lived without gratitude is not a life properly lived. It is a life that is lived off-kilter: one in which, incapable of realizing what you have to be thankful for, you are left with nothing but your resentments and can be contented by nothing but revenge.”

— Douglas Murray

26. “T. S. Eliot memorably described it, an effort at ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.”

— Douglas Murray

27. “He suggests that one cure for anyone troubled by homoerotic temptations is that they might consider taking up a healthy pursuit such as ‘going to a gym’. Suggesting, perhaps, that Dr Nicolosi has never been to a gym.”

— Douglas Murray

28. “Search for ‘Black family’ and you will see smiling black families all the way down, without even a mixed-race family in sight. Type in ‘White family’ on the other hand and three out of the five images in the first line alone are either of a black or mixed-race family. Soon it is black family after black family.”

— Douglas Murray

29. “Efforts to silence the people who raised their voice – whether through violence, intimidation or the courts – meant that three decades after the Rushdie affair there was almost no one in Europe who would dare write a novel, compose a piece of music or even draw an image that might risk Muslim anger. Indeed, they ran in the other direction. Politicians and almost everybody else went out of their way to show how much they admired Islam.”

— Douglas Murray

30. “Trans campaigners intent on arguing that trans is hardware can only win their argument if they persuade people that being a woman is a matter of software. And not all feminists are willing to concede that one.”

— Douglas Murray

31. “If there was a genuine chance of diminishing racism, sexism or anti-gay sentiment, who would not wish to seize it with every tool and engine at their disposal? The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal. Indeed, it decides that truth is part of the problem – a hurdle that must be got over. So where diversity and representation are found to have been inadequate in the past, this can be solved most easily by changing the past.”

— Douglas Murray

32. “For the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the German Lutheran Church and many other branches of European Christianity, the message of the religion has become a form of left-wing politics, diversity action and social welfare projects.”

— Douglas Murray

33. “For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead.”

— Douglas Murray

34. “Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair.”

— Douglas Murray

35. “Consider the example of trans. There was a reason to linger over the difficult and poorly discussed issue of people who are born intersex. It was not for prurience but to make a point. As Eric Weinstein has observed, anyone genuinely interested in addressing the stigmatization and unhappiness felt by people who are in the wrong bodies would have started addressing the question of intersex first.”

— Douglas Murray

36. “If the burden of working for little reward in an isolating society stripped of any overriding purpose can be recognised to have an effect on individuals, how could it not also be said to have an effect on society as a whole? Or to put it the other way around, if enough people in a society are suffering from a form of exhaustion, might it not be that the society they are living in has become exhausted?”

— Douglas Murray

37. “They are an American Delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologize for the crusades’, said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.”

— Douglas Murray

38. “Their priority has been not to clamp down on the thing to which the public are objecting but, rather, to the objecting public. If anybody wanted a textbook case on how politics goes wrong, here is one.”

— Douglas Murray

39. “When it comes to anti-fascism in most of Western Europe, there would appear for now to be a supply-and-demand problem: the demand for fascists vastly outstrips the actual supply.”

— Douglas Murray

40. “If it is assumed that the primary purpose in life is to make as much money as possible, then it is indeed possible that having a child will constitute a ‘penalty’ for a woman and thereby prevent her from having a larger sum of money in her bank account when she dies. On the other hand, if she chooses to pay that ‘penalty’ she might be fortunate enough to engage in the most important and fulfilling role that a human being can have.”

— Douglas Murray

41. “Europeans have been deflating the language of anti-fascism ahead of a time when they might need it.”

— Douglas Murray

42. “McIntosh urges people to ‘raise our daily consciousness’ on the nature of privilege and attempt to use ‘our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader basis’. This suggests that McIntosh is not against power, just in favour of some redistribution of it along different lines.”

— Douglas Murray

43. “For Nietzsche, one of the dangers of the men of ressentiment is that they will achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves – to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy “start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: ‘It’s a disgrace to be happy!”

— Douglas Murray

44. “Any parent may notice the differences between their sons and daughters, but the culture tells them that there are none or that those that are there are purely ‘performative’ issues.”

— Douglas Murray

45. “Hume and Kant set the foundations in their work for the arguments that would make racism untenable. They helped to expose its fundamental flaws. For instance, Hume argued “that morality is based on humans’ natural attunement to one another’s feelings and a discomfort at sensing others’ discomfort that can be elevated into more impartial justice.”

— Douglas Murray

46. “All the years of education and learning, all the knowledge and experience in that head was destroyed in a moment by people who had achieved none of those things.”

— Douglas Murray

47. “Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment.”

— Douglas Murray

48. “Samuel Huntington, wrote in his last book, ‘Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilisation. It is basically an anti-Western ideology’.8.”

— Douglas Murray

49. “This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.”

— Douglas Murray

50. “If there remains any overriding idea it is that ideas are a problem. If there is any remaining commonly held value judgement it is that value judgements are wrong. If there remains any remaining certainty it is a distrust of certainty. And if this does not add up to a philosophy it certainly adds up to an attitude: shallow, unlikely to survive any sustained onslaught, but easy enough to adopt.”

— Douglas Murray