Theodore Dalrymple
Writer
1949-10-11
English writer, cultural critic, and retired physician known for essays on social policy, medicine, and culture. Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels.
Books by Theodore Dalrymple
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Life at the Bottom
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Our Culture, What's Left of It
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Not with a bang but a whimper
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Quotes by Theodore Dalrymple
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Demonstrative proof is lacking, but if we thought only about those things about which such proof were available, our minds would be empty most of the time.
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Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.
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There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.
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To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
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Demonstrative proof is lacking, but if we thought only about those things about which such proof were available, our minds would be empty most of the time.
Read quote -
To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
Read quote -
There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.
Read quote -
Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.
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Many young people now end a discussion with the supposedly definitive and unanswerable statement that such is their opinion, and their opinion is just as valid as anyone else's. The fact is that our opinion on an infinitely large number of questions is not worth having, because everyone is infinitely ignorant.
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Considering the importance of resentment in our lives, and the damage it does, it receives scant attention from psychiatrists and psychologists. Resentment is a great rationalizer: it presents us with selected versions of our own past, so that we do not recognize our own mistakes and avoid the necessity to make painful choices.
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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 fourteen-year-olds now to establish friendships with twenty-six-year-olds - because they know by the age of fourteen all they are ever going to know.
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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.
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