Top 70 Theodore Dalrymple Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

2. “To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

3. “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

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “The purpose of those who argue for cultural diversity is to impose ideological uniformity.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

11. “Equality of Ugliness: If we can’t all live in a beautiful place we must all live in an ugly place.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

12. “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

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

14. “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

15. “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

16. “If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will be confused. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything. Confucius’s.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

17. “The Cartesian point of moral epistemology: I’m angry, therefore I’m right.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Political correctness is often the attempt to make sentimentality socially obligatory or legally enforceable.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

22. “The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

23. “Political correctness is the means by which we try to control others; decency is the means by which we try to control ourselves.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

25. “It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it – in other words, by becoming civilized – that men become fully human.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

26. “The worth of a cause is not necessarily proportional to the lengths to which people will go to promote it.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

27. “Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?”

— Theodore Dalrymple

28. “One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

29. “As the Habsburg military used to say, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

30. “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.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

31. “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

32. “That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos – that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished – is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

33. “Pauperism is above all a psychological, not an economic, condition.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

34. “There can be no greater pleasure in life,” Stalin is reputed to have said, “than to choose one’s enemy, inflict a terrible revenge on him, and go quietly to bed.” He might have added, if he really did say this, “secure in the knowledge that one has done good.” Committing evil for goodness’ sake must surely rank as an even greater pleasure than Stalin’s: It satisfies the inner sadist and the inner moralist at the same time.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

35. “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

36. “For them, the real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: ‘How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?”

— Theodore Dalrymple

37. “Life is conceived as a vast supermarket through which one moves with one’s shopping trolley, fetching down ways of life from shelves marked “Existential choices.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

38. “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

39. “Behaviorism was but one instance of a terrible temptation for all intellectuals, namely that of nothing-but-ism. History is nothing but the clash of class interests, human behavior is nothing but a response to economic incentives, etc., etc.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

40. “Multiculturalism rests on the supposition – or better, the dishonest pretense – that all cultures are equal and that no fundamental conflict can arise between the customs, mores, and philosophical outlooks of two different cultures.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

41. “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

42. “Under communism all minorities dance.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

43. “Where two pieties – feminism and multiculturalism – come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

44. “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

45. “When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as ‘nonjudgmental.’ For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

46. “To base one’s rejection of what exists – and hence one’s prescription for a better world – upon the petty frustrations of one’s youth, as surely many middle-class radicals have done, is profoundly egotistical. Unless consciously rejected, this impulse leads to a tendency throughout life to judge the rightness or wrongness of policies by one’s personal emotional response to them, as if emotion were an infallible guide.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

47. “Yet literal-mindedness is not honesty or fidelity to truth – far from it. For it is the whole experience of mankind that sexual life is always, and must always be, hidden by veils of varying degrees of opacity, if it is to be humanized into something beyond a mere animal function. What is inherently secretive, that is to say self-conscious and human, cannot be spoken of directly; the attempt leads only to crudity, not to truth.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

48. “In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

49. “Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

50. “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