Thursday, March 28, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Anthony Daniels


English writer and retired physician who frequently uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple.
Anthony Daniels
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small.
Daniels quotes
To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press. Spasms of self-righteousness are its substitute for the moral life.
Daniels
If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not.




Daniels Anthony quotes
There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic.
Daniels Anthony
Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.
Anthony Daniels quotes
Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex.
Anthony Daniels
Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking.
Daniels Anthony quotes
For intellectuals, everyone’s mind is closed but their own.
Daniels
It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilized—that men become fully human.
Daniels Anthony
In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome.
Anthony Daniels
Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion.




Anthony Daniels quotes
<14:06> ...Of course I made it quite clear to the women that I thought that that the way that they had been abused was terrible and completely unjustifiable. However, I thought that it was very important that they should understand their own complicity in it; so that, for example, they understood that the way they chose men, and their refusal to see signs (which they were capable of seeing) resulted in their misery… <14:40> To give you a concrete example, I would say to them, ‘This man of yours, who’s very nasty to you, and drags you across the floor, and puts your head through the window, and sometimes even hangs you out of the window by your ankles: How long do you think it would take me to realise he was no good, as he came through the door? Would it take me a second, or half a second, or an eighth of a second, or would I not notice that there was anything wrong with him at all?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, an eighth of a second, you’d know immediately.’ And I would say to them, ‘Well, if you know that I would know immediately, then you knew immediately as well.’ It’s a logical consequence, really. And they would accept that. ‘And yet, you chose to associate with him, knowing full well that he was no good; and I tell you this, because it’s very necessary you should understand your own part in the predicament you now find yourself in, because if you don’t understand it, or don’t think about it, you’re just going to repeat it.’ which is of course, a very, very common pattern.
Anthony Daniels
The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty.
Daniels quotes
Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism.
Daniels Anthony
Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles.
Daniels Anthony quotes
The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men’s souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction.
Anthony Daniels
Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.
Anthony Daniels quotes
The main difference between working in an NHS hospital in Britain and a prison is that prison is much safer.
Anthony Daniels
Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy.
Daniels Anthony
Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.


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